Nassim Assefi

Nassim Assefi is a physician, global health specialist, health tech strategist, content curator, civic innovator, peace activist, and novelist who enjoys living at the intersection of many worlds. Her doctoring is a blend of internal medicine, gynecology, psychiatry, human rights, and public health. Her consulting work ranges widely—from sexual and reproductive health advising to primary care health strategies for low income countries, health tech start-ups to human rights medicine. Her novels (Aria, published by Harcourt and translated into 5 other languages, and forthcoming Say I Am You) explore complex issues like navigating grief without religion or ritual and the land mines of humanitarianism. Nassim typically works as a self-employed consultant juggling various passionate projects. Currently, most of her time is spent as a strategic consultant to Tomorrow's Women, the only cross-border peace NGO in Israel/Palestine invested in young women as a powerful pathway to peace. Her last quasi full-time job was as a primary care and COVID doctor for the Lummi Tribe. Before that, as an Executive Leader and metrics expert at Roundglass, a global well-being company. She was also Executive Director of MEDICC, an NGO that translates the remarkable public health achievements of Cuba to the US context and beyond. Her most fun job has been as curator/Director of Stage Content for TEDMED, the health and medicine edition of the TED Conference, leading speaker and performer selection and coaching for TEDMED's annual event (she remains a diehard TEDster and engaged TEDFellow). She has thrived as an academic at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and Nagasaki University School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health. She has done many missions in global health, the most significant of which was in Afghanistan (where she was also an underground salsa dance teacher). In her spare time, she has been defending refugee/migrant rights, practicing medicine in a community health clinic serving "urban vulnerables" (the US correlate of her global health work), doing health and career coaching, speaking and podcasting (co-host and producer of one season of The Art of Risk Podcast), serving as a menstrual health ambassador in Morocco, and pilot-testing civic experiments (her next one is living in an ecovillage along the Mediterranean). She also enjoys writing, narrating, and advising TEDEd talks (see https://ed.ted.com/search?qs=nassim+assefi). A second generation Iranian-American and soloist mother by choice based in Rabat, Morocco, Nassim has lived in 10 countries on the 5 major continents and speaks more than a handful of languages. Favorite awards/fellowships include: TEDGlobal Fellowship, Hedgebrook Writing Residency, University of Washington's Woman of Courage, Jack Straw Writer, and Seattle Metropolitan's Top Doctor. Nassim is a graduate of Wellesley College, the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Harvard/Brigham and Women's Hospital Internal Medicine Residency Program. When asked the inevitable "What do you do?" question, Nassim enjoys making up futuristic-sounding job titles like expert generalist, social justice entrepreneur, philomath, and thrillionaire.