Dr. Altaf Saadi, MD

Dr. Altaf Saadi is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She is also the Associate Director of the MGH Asylum Clinic, which serves people applying for asylum in the U.S. by providing forensic medical and psychological evaluations. 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. She is the Principal Investigator of the “Neurodisparities and Health Justice Lab,” and her research considers trauma at multiple levels, including physical-based injury like brain injury, psychological injury, neighborhood-level trauma, and institutional violence.

Dr. Saadi has partnered with numerous human rights, legal and civil rights organizations, having served as a medical expert for the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigrant Justice Center, Human Rights First, Disability Rights California, and others. Her commitment to racial and social justice has also involved leveraging her expertise as a physician to demand an end to police violence, including speaking against the junk diagnosis of excited delirium, the use of carotid neck restraints by law enforcement, the medical harms of police attack dogs, and the harms of hospital police. Her academic and personal writing work has been published in The Lancet, JAMA, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Network Open, Neurology, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, STAT News, Ms. Magazine, Undark Magazine, among others.

She was named a 2020 "STAT Wunderkind," 2021 National Minority Quality Forum "40 under 40 Leader in Minority Health,” and received the 2023 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility, a national award for health justice leadership. Dr. Saadi completed her undergraduate studies at Yale College, and medical degree at Harvard Medical School, where she graduated cum laude and received the Dean’s Community Service Award. She completed her neurology residency at the Harvard Mass General Brigham Residency program, where she also served as Chief Resident, and a post-doctoral health services research fellowship with the National Clinician Scholars Program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received a master's degree in Health Policy and Management.