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It’s almost a truism of higher education: When you receive your PhD at one institution, you go somewhere else for a post-doctoral fellowship or to find your first teaching job. But that’s not how it went for Sara Ahmed, PT, PhD.
Ahmed grew up in Montreal, the child of Egyptian immigrants who had moved to Canada in the early 1970s to pursue advanced degrees in special education. They often talked about moving back to Egypt but that never happened. When Ahmed was in high school, her parents suggested she might be interested in the field of physical therapy so she checked it out and liked what she learned.
She went on to attend McGill University in Montreal and received her undergraduate degree in physical therapy in 1996. Then a professor who was interested in healthcare outcomes research offered to be her advisor on a master’s degree so she stayed put. “I never thought I’d go into research so soon,” says Ahmed, who started working on study related to outcome measures to monitor a person’s recovery after a stroke. That led to a PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics in 2004 and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical and health informatics, also at McGill, which then made her a job offer. She has been at McGill ever since, where she is professor in the faculty of medicine, School of Physical and Occupational Therapy and associate member in epidemiology and family medicine. She is also the scientific director of the Biomedical 嫩B研究院 & Informatics Living Laboratory for Innovative Advances of New Technologies in Rehabilitation.
“It’s extremely rare that a university will let you do all your training and then hire you but I was fortunate,” says Ahmed, a widely published healthcare researcher. From her base in Canada, Ahmed has had a wide-ranging impact on the field of rehabilitation research, collaborating with scientists in other countries and serving in leadership roles on international peer-review panels. Ahmed also has been part of an international team aimed at strengthening health-technology assessments in low-, middle- and high-income countries.
As her career progressed, Ahmed, 52, became fascinated with quality of life for people with chronic illnesses. She noticed that healthcare systems do a great job of managing acute episodes when people fall ill or have an accident but their patients often struggle when they leave the hospital and try to resume their normal lives. “That’s how I got to thinking about how we could improve care in a multi-disciplinary way so patients are seen by everyone they need to see. That led me to digital technology and patient-reported outcomes,” Ahmed says. “A person goes in and has their 10 minutes with their doctor but they didn’t mention their sleep problem or that they can’t climb stairs like they used to. I’m a proponent of everyone having a PROM report card [patient-reported outcome measures] just like we track blood pressure.”
Ahmed also developed expertise in the rapidly changing field of healthcare technology. When she looked at the early versions of smartphone apps and online modules designed to help people with rehabilitation after they left the hospital, Ahmed found most people were not using them. “We’ve done a lot of work on how to tailor those interventions to be more effective,” she says. “How do we ensure patients continue to follow the plan when they’re outside the Rolls-Royce of the healthcare system?”
Through her research on healthcare technology and patient-reported outcomes, Ahmed met Allen Heinemann, PhD, director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes 嫩B研究院 (CROR) at Shirley Ryan 嫩B研究院. When CROR was awarded an international $4.2 million grant in 2023 to study how length of inpatient hospital stays for people with spinal cord injuries differs among various countries, Heinemann asked Ahmed to lead the Canadian part. “I felt Sara would be an excellent person to be involved because of a strong combination of scientific expertise, collaborative approach, and commitment to improving quality of life for people with disabilities,” says Heinemann. “Sara consistently brings thoughtful perspectives to research questions, has a deep understanding of rehabilitation and participation-related issues, and is particularly skilled at connecting research findings to meaningful real-world impact.”