PERSON: Qanta Ahmed

Physician, Author, Commentator

Dr. Qanta Ahmed is a subspecialist board certified sleep disorders specialist and faculty attending physician in the Department of Medicine as part of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, New York. Dr. Ahmed is appointed Associate Professor of Medicine at the State University of New York (Stony Brook). She practices sleep disorders medicine in Garden City at the Winthrop University Sleep Disorders Center where she treats adolescents and adults of all ages.<br> <br> Dr. Ahmed is also a non-fiction author. Her first book, In the Land of Invisible Women (Sourcebooks 2008) details her experience of living and working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and has been published internationally in 13 countries including in translation and is now in its 12th edition.<br> <br> A graduate of the University of Nottingham, England, she has been a physician for 20 years, and is now a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. She holds an Honorary Professorship at Glasgow Caledonian University at the School of Public Health.<br> <br> Her academic interests include pulmonary infection, sleep medicine, public health and health media communications. She is a recognized expert in health issues pertaining to the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage Muslims make each year. Her work relating to Hajj medicine has appeared in The Lancet and a number of other leading publications. She has been a regular faculty contributor to the American College of Chest Physicians for Sleep Medicine Education both in general session and in specific sleep medicine workshops including simulation center teaching.<br> <br> She is also a journalist. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post where she writes about political and religious issues pertaining to Islam, the Middle East, Medicine and global health diplomacy. She is a regular columnist for the USA Today Your Life section where she writes the Sleep Matters page. She has contributed editorials to CNN.com and has provided radio and television commentary including the BBC World Service, Voice of America, WNPR and NPR, CNN, Fox, C-Span, Al Arabiya and others.<br> She is a frequent Op-Ed contributor to the Dutch National Trouw and Israel’s Ha’aretz and she has also been published in the Jerusalem Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The Daily, The Telegraph, The Daily Beast, Pakistan’s The Daily Times, Gulf News, The Times of Israel, The Investigative Project on Terrorism and the World Policy Journal. She is the first physician and first Muslim woman to be selected as a 2010 Templeton Cambridge Fellow in Journalism at the University of Cambridge, England. During this time she completed her treatise on the psychological manipulation of Islam in the service of terror, focusing on the cultural phenomenon of suicide bombing. Her expertise lead to Dr. Ahmed’s first opportunity to testify to US Congress in June 2012, at the request of the Homeland Security Committee as a witness for the Majority in the 5th Investigative Hearings on Radical Islam in the United States.<br> <br> Dr. Ahmed is a noted speaker in both her fields of medicine and journalism. She has addressed the National Press Club in Washington DC, Boston Children’s Hospital, The Medical University of South Carolina, The University of South Carolina, The Union League Club of Philadelphia, The Citadel, Cambridge University, Glasgow Caledonian University, the Saudi Arabian National Guard Health Affairs in Riyadh and Jeddah, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health, the US Consulate in Jeddah, the Saudi Arabian Football Federation, FIFA’s medical research committee at Qatar’s Aspetar in Doha (home of the 2022 World Cup) and many other national and international venues.<br> <br> At request, she has been privileged to address congregations at Temple Emmanuel in Charleston South Carolina, KKBE also in Charleston and Temple Sinai in Roslyn New York.<br> <br> Recently, she was honored by NYMOVES Magazine as a 2010 Power Woman. She volunteers her limited time for Women’s Voices Now, a non profit foundation sponsoring the first film festival focusing on Muslim Women and Girls in her role as a Member of the Board of Directors. She is also an active member of the OpEd Project, representing them as an OpEd Alum Ambassador here in New York City.<br> <br> She is now embarking on her second book, a non-fiction work which will focus on interfaith relations between Muslims and Jews and she has just completed her first fiction work at the invitation of Akashic Books published this spring in an anthology of stories in ‘Long Island Noir’. Dr. Ahmed lives in New York.