Akashleena Mallick: Putting voice to purpose, uplifting others

Dr. Akashleena Mallick is driven by compassion. She was motivated to study neurology and earn her medical degree to help people who have lost their speech, memory or movement. By obtaining a master of public health degree from Brown, Mallick feels like she can expand her contributions: Instead of helping one patient, she can make an impact on populations and systems. She brings not only clinical expertise but also the tools to communicate her dedication to equity in health care and her commitment to serve.

“That’s what Brown did for me: Helped me put a voice to my purpose,” Mallick said.

Mallick is fond of saying that she’s “support-made” and credits her achievements to a long list of people who have offered mentorship and inspiration, starting with her family.

She grew up in Kolkata, India. When she was 14, her sister, who was born with Down syndrome, died due to what Mallick described as “medical negligence.” After a long period of feeling helpless, Mallick decided to learn how to provide medical care — to help patients get better and return home to their families, “since my sister could not,” she said. She attended medical school in Kolkata and began to practice neurology. 

In 2019, she came to the U.S. to pursue a clinical research fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. While the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Boston, she saw how inequities worsened health outcomes — a reality that surprised her. 

“I was used to health disparities in India, but I didn’t expect that in a country like the United States,” she said. 

She joined Massachusetts General Hospital as a postdoctoral fellow, an experience that ignited her dedication to advancing health equity. Mallick had followed the work of Dr. Ashish Jha, then director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and now dean at the Brown University School of Public Health. His evidence-based communication and leadership further motivated her to pursue public health training to expand her impact on systems and populations, she said. 

Mallick was accepted to the Accelerated MPH for Clinicians program at Brown, where she continued to focus on stroke prevention and recovery, but on a much broader level. For her MPH capstone project, she investigated the management of hypertension, an important modifiable risk factor for stroke, in lower-middle-income countries. 

“Through public health, I'm not sitting in one room as a physician talking to just one patient and their caregivers,” Mallick said. “I get to have systems-level and population-level impact.” 

In the same way that being a physician taught her to learn to listen to patients and care teams, Mallick said, being a Brown public health student taught her about listening to communities. She offered an example: As a practitioner, she may believe that hypertension care is key to preventing stroke in a certain community — but by engaging with that community, it may become clear that a better approach involves a culturally tailored diet. 

“From my teachers and courses, I feel like I’ve learned that people’s lived experiences are tools we can use to make the world a better place,” she said.

To practice communicating science to the public, Mallick presented a talk about community engagement and health literacy for brain health at Research Matters, a showcase of ideas hosted by Brown’s Graduate School. The experience was valuable, she said, in bringing to life some of the lessons she’s learned at Brown.

“It made me think about how much I have to learn from people in various disciplines who bring different perspectives,” she said. “That’s something that Brown does really well: Bring people together to share ideas and collaborate on solutions very easily and inclusively.” 

Mallick used her voice on behalf of fellow graduate students as a member of the Brown University Community Council, a forum for discussion and recommendations on campus issues.

“I had the responsibility of making sure I communicated graduate students’ concerns, needs and aspirations in a way that benefitted them and helped them grow,” Mallick said, noting that she voiced views on the ethical use of AI for curricula at Brown.

She saw another opportunity to contribute when she was selected as the speaker for the Master’s Ceremony during Commencement and Reunion Weekend. In a time of global uncertainty, she wants to invite graduates to see challenges as opportunities. Her speech calls for scholars to embrace collective purpose, encourage dialogue and turn adversity into momentum for progress.

“My speech will be a celebration of curiosity and courage,” Mallick said. “That's the spirit that Brown has generously nurtured in us. I also want to remind us that greatest leadership comes from being intentionally compassionate and deeply purposeful in how we uplift the most vulnerable and shape the world.”

After receiving her master’s degree, Mallick plans to continue to collaborate with community groups here and in India on research projects while pursuing a Ph.D. and a clinical residency in the U.S.

Melaine Ferdinand-King: Taking knowledge to the people

Melaine Ferdinand-King describes herself as a non-traditional academic.

While working at Brown toward her Ph.D. in Africana studies, she’s never lost sight of what she believes is an overlooked imperative for modern scholars: To engage actively with the broader community. As a poet, curator and archivist, Ferdinand-King works to bring people in Providence and New England into conversation with the humanities through art exhibitions.

“I don’t believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” Ferdinand-King said. “Part of my work is trying to invite people into discovery and appreciation of the humanities, because understanding cultural and political frameworks is really essential to building communal power.”

Ferdinand-King studies Afrosurrealism — a literary, theoretical and artistic genre that uses surrealist conventions to express the experiences of people navigating racism, colonialism, displacement and political marginalization. She says the genre offers a means to make sense of the often-contradictory realities experienced by people of the Black diaspora throughout the world.

“Artists and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries began to question what it meant to be a citizen and non-citizen simultaneously, to question what it meant to be a political subject, yet not fully regarded as people with rights, ideas or bodies worthy of respect,” she said. “And so my work in cultural studies asks us to consider: Who are we and how do we express ourselves? How have we understood ourselves as social beings, cultural workers and political actors in a surreal landscape, where the social and political terms set for some don't necessarily apply to everyone? What is the relationship between our art and politics in the 21st century?”

One of the things that interests Ferdinand-King about the Afrosurrealists she studies is that they were often not fully accepted even within their own traditions. For example, she says that Zora Neale Hurston — a writer and anthropologist — was marginalized in the Harlem Renaissance movement for her focus on the less-cosmopolitan experience of southern culture. Suzanne Césaire, a theorist and activist in Martinique, was often marginalized as a woman in the Francophone Négritude movement writing on the Caribbean environment and cultural consciousness.

“I explore these double-marginalized figures within this developing canon to think about how we break from dominant cultural and intellectual models,” Ferdinand-King said. “I want to look for ways to open ourselves up to creating new possibilities for civic engagement, community-building, imagination and ethical cultural strategy.”

Along the way, Ferdinand-King has committed herself to breaking down a different model — that of the scholar who is disconnected from the communities around them. In her work beyond the Van Wickle Gates, she has curated art exhibitions at Brown, RISD and venues across the world. She’s also co-director of the Vanta Guild, Providence’s first Afrodiasporic photography collective.

She co-founded the RISD Museum’s Black Biennial, which has had iterations in 2022 and 2024, and her 2023 exhibition titled “Poiesis: Street Culture and the Art of the City” drew more than 1,000 attendees on opening night and featured more than 30 artists working at the nexus of urban design and futurism. Most recently, she curated “Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal” at Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center. For that project, she assisted with the acquisition of Abu-Jamal’s archival records, writings and artwork as part of a Pembroke Center fellowship in 2021.

Ferdinand-King believes that cultural experiences will increase public appreciation for the humanities and engagement with the local arts. It’s unfortunate, she says, that the arts and culture sectors often don’t command the same respect as STEM fields, when both are essential and can work in conversation with each other.

“When it comes to fields like public health or biomedical engineering, a lot of the work is trying to understand people's experiences, interactions with each other and their interplay with advanced technology or medicine,” she said. “A considerable aspect of scientific research draws from qualitative datasets and humanities-based work, but we don't typically acknowledge their significant overlap, and we don’t give the humanities the same intellectual credit.”

In her address to her fellow Ph.D. graduates, Ferdinand-King hopes to inspire her fellow Ph.D. graduates not to wall themselves off, either within academia or within their own disciplines.

“As an active resident and participant in the Providence and broader New England community, I want to not only advance knowledge, but to cultivate meaningful exchange with communities toward new solutions for change,” she said. “I felt like we needed a Commencement speech that discussed the cultural landscape, and how we can use our roles to enrich both academic scholarship and everyday encounters through mutual growth, education and shared purpose.”

Ferdinand-King says she recognizes that this expansiveness might be outside the comfort zone of some scholars, but she hopes Brown’s graduates will reimagine the conventional.

“My message is to defy expectations and challenge yourself to be more than the traditional,” she said. “And trust yourself — trust yourself enough to show up in spaces where you're needed, even if you don't feel like that particular path was originally carved out for you.”

In that, Ferdinand-King has led by example. She’s worked not only to create original research, but also to create ways for knowledge and experience to be accessible in spaces where it can have the greatest impact. In the future, she says she plans to work with local organizations and academic institutions to revitalize cities and urban development through “thought design” and cultural strategy, beginning in Providence.