About Naa Asheley

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey is a writer and aspiring physician-scientist originally from Chicago whose work sits at the intersection of cancer immunology, public health, and the humanities. 

She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with honors, specializing in fiction, and a minor in the Biological Sciences. During her undergraduate training, she developed parallel interests in narrative writing and biology, becoming increasingly interested in how storytelling shapes public understanding of science, illness, and medical decision-making.

From 2021 to 2024, she was a PROPEL Post-Baccalaureate Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, where she conducted full-time research in cancer immunology and cancer immunotherapy. Her work primarily focused on understanding immune–tumor interactions and mechanisms of immune regulation within the tumor microenvironment, contributing to translational efforts aimed at improving immunotherapeutic strategies across cancer types.

She is currently a second-year MD–PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. In 2026, she began her doctoral training in the Cellular and Molecular Pathology Graduate Program under the co-mentorship of Dr. Zachary Morris and Dr. Quaovi Sodji as a UW-Madison SciMed Graduate Research Scholar Fellow. Her doctoral research investigates the integration of CAR T cell therapy, immune checkpoint blockade, and radiopharmaceutical therapies as strategies to overcome immune resistance in solid tumors. Her broader scientific interests include spatial and systems-level approaches to understanding immune dynamics within complex tissue environments.

Long term, she aims to establish an independent research laboratory studying the intersection of cancer immunology, autoimmunity, and public health. Her research vision centers on applying systems immunology approaches to compare the tumor microenvironment with chronically inflamed tissues observed in autoimmune disease, that long term, could inform new therapeutic strategies that improve cancer immunotherapy while reducing immune-mediated toxicity and advancing equitable, population-level health outcomes.

Alongside her scientific work, Ashitey is also a published writer. Her creative and nonfiction writing explores themes of identity, medicine, memory, and structural inequities within academic and healthcare systems. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, and The Cincinnati Review, and her editorials and opinion writing have appeared in The Xylom, MedPage Today, and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and The Dashboard Awards.

Through both her writing and advocacy work, she seeks to strengthen dialogue between medicine, science, and the public by making complex scientific and policy conversations more accessible, transparent, and human-centered. By bringing narrative and lived experience into conversations often dominated by technical language, she hopes to create space for wider participation in discussions about the future of medicine and scientific discovery.

She remains deeply committed to mentorship, equity in academic medicine, and increasing accessibility for first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students pursuing careers in science and medicine. Drawing from her own experiences navigating academic and research spaces, she has been involved in leadership and advocacy efforts focused on reducing structural barriers to training, improving transparency around academic pathways, and supporting trainees whose perspectives have historically been underrepresented within biomedical research. She views mentorship not only as individual guidance, but as an institutional responsibility: one that requires intentional investment in inclusive environments where students from diverse backgrounds can thrive without needing to separate their identities from their scientific ambitions.

As it always should be.