Altaf Saadi

NextGen Scholar

Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director of the MGH Asylum Clinic

Dr. Altaf Saadi is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director of the MGH Asylum Clinic, which provides forensic medical evaluations to individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. She is a medical expert for the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network and has served as a medical expert with other human rights and civil rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights First, National Immigrant Justice Center, and Disability Rights California assessing the conditions of confinement in U.S. immigration detention centers. She serves on the Society of Refugee Health Providers (a binational organization of providers in the US and Canada) Research, Evaluation, and Ethics Committee, and on the Lancet Commission for Public Policy in the Trump Era. Her federally funded research focuses on advancing health equity within neurology and health care more broadly by targeting social and structural determinants of health, with a focus on addressing the needs of immigrants and forcibly displaced persons, both within the community and in immigration detention. For example, this includes leveraging her expertise as a neurologist to adapt neurocognitive interventions for U.S. refugees and asylum seekers with cognitive impairment and traumatic brain injury, among other interdisciplinary, community-engaged research efforts. She has been recognized as a 2021 National Minority Quality Forum “40 Under 40” minority health leader, and received the 2023 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility, a national award in the U.S. for health justice leadership.