About

LaShyra “Lash” Nolen is a Los Angeles native deeply passionate about the concerns of under-served and marginalized communities. She graduated with honors from Loyola Marymount University in 2017 with a B.S. in Health and Human Sciences and spent her gap years before starting medical school, as a Fulbright Scholar in Spain and AmeriCorps member in Chicago. Currently, she is a second-year student at Harvard Medical School where she is serving as the university’s student council president, the first documented black woman to hold this leadership position. She is a published author and fervent advocate for social justice whose commentary has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, NPR, Teen Vogue, and HuffPost, among others. Her worked earned her the honor of becoming the 2020 National Minority Quality Forum’s Youngest “40 under 40 Leader in Minority Health” and named a “2020 Young Futurist” by The Root Magazine. In the future she plans to pursue an MPP alongside her medical degree to advocate for humane healthcare reform as a physician activist. Listen in to this conversation to hear all about social justice in medicine, the Black Lives Matter movement, and what people under 10 have to show us about how to live and run the world. Throughout this episode, Lash and I talk about different resources regarding social justice, medicine, and racism. Check them out here: What they Eyes Don’t See by Dr. Mona Hanna-AttishaRhea Boyd, MD, MPHDiagnosis, From the New York Times: A Netflix Series. “Dr. Lisa Sanders crowdsources diagnoses for mysterious and rare medical conditions in a documentary series based on her New York Times Magazine Column.”White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, PhDHow to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. KendiMedical Apartheid by Harriet A. WashingtonKilling the Black Body by Dorothy E. Roberts