Girls, young women only need passion to succeed in sciences, top UAE health official says

Abu Dhabi: Dr Farida Al Hosani is a household name in the UAE. Her clear and supportive messages over the last few years have guided and reassured residents as the world battled one of its toughest health-care challenges till date.

It is therefore more than apt that on International Day for Women and Girls in Science, she has stressed that women and girls never need to feel constrained.

“The only thing women and girls in UAE need to invest in is their passion. Here in the UAE, they are lucky. They have all the support from the community and our young daughters are especially lucky as they have all the support from the government too,” Dr Al Hosani, executive director for infectious diseases at the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) and official spokesperson for the UAE’s health sector, told Gulf News.

Past challenges

The public health official has herself had a long and illustrious journey in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), but it started off as a much steeper road. She remembers how she was among the 40 women chosen to join medicine as a field of study in the early 1990s, at one of the UAE’s only institutions of higher education that had a medical college at the time — UAE University.

“It was not common for women in the UAE back then to go into medicine. And while my immediate family has always been supportive, I remember that they had to convince members of the extended family, who were worried that it was not the right field for women. At the time, most women worked in teaching, but my family supported me and believed in me,” Dr Al Hosani remembered.

Serving the community

She was resolute, however, that she wanted to study medicine. “I remember attending a funeral as a young girl when a woman fainted there. No one knew what to do to help her. And while I had always loved Math and Biology in school, this incident strengthened my resolve to study medicine and to one day be able to use the sciences to help people,” Dr Al Hosani explained.

Palpable support

The accomplished infectious diseases specialist said she found rousing support from her schoolteachers and later from the faculty members at the university. Looking back, she especially treasures her graduation day in 1996.

“It was so inspiring. We had a chance to meet Her Highness Shaikh Fatima bint Mubarak, Mother of the Nation, and were made to feel so special as graduating doctors. In fact, we even had a chance to take the Hippocratic Oath in her presence. I had tears in my eyes!” Dr Al Hosani said.

Trusted voice

Since then, Dr Al Hosani has gone on to amass one accolade after another while working in Abu Dhabi’s health sector. Steering the emirate to take a tougher stance against infectious diseases by promoting vaccination, awareness and prevention, her efforts came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. Residents came to know her as one of the UAE’s trusted public health officials steering them through the many precautionary measures that helped keep the community safe. And for many young women, her leadership has become a source of inspiration.

No limitations

Dr Al Hosani said today’s young girls should feel encouraged to choose any career to which they put their minds, especially as the Emirati community will back them fully. “[Thinking that a woman’s place is at home] is an [archaic] way of thinking. It may persist in a few places still, but in the UAE, women are encouraged to participate in all sectors. There are no limitations to the choices they wish to make,” she added.

Lot of opportunities

“I was lucky to join a programme for Government Innovation by the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Cambridge University. This helped me to see that any challenge we faced had a solution and that we just needed to invest time and effort to reach that solution. This means that there is big potential in the UAE to develop further in technology, research and artificial intelligence. These fields are the focus of the government and there are a lot of opportunities to pursue the sciences in the private sector,” the official said.

These opportunities exist not only in the traditional sciences, but also in newer fields. “There are a lot of emerging fields as well that are strategically important, such as space, and even subspecialities within medicine itself, which I would encourage [today’s young girls] to explore,” Dr Al Hosani added.