Undergraduate Commencement Speaker Misha Afnani centers work on health inequities
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Public Health undergraduate student Misha Afnani entered college thinking that she was medical school bound.
As preparation, Afnani—who started her higher education at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, before transferring to UC Berkeley in her junior year—got a job as a medical assistant at a local urgent care clinic. But what she experienced there led her away from medical school and towards the field of public health.
“I worked there for over a year and a half and saw a lot of things wrong with the system,” she said. “As I kept working in the healthcare system, I kept getting more and more frustrated. We were turning away patients.”
Working at the clinic reminded Afnani of her parents’ experience as Iranian immigrants.
“As someone with immigrant parents I paid extra attention to patients whose second language was English and I noticed the patterns of inequity.” Afnani said. “I saw how providers didn’t try as hard with these types of patients and didn’t give them the same quality of care. This made me think of my own family so I was always persistent in listening intently to them and addressing any and all concerns they had because that’s the kind of care I would want my own family to receive in healthcare settings.”
Her experience led Afnani to question whether or not medical school was still the right path for her. And then a De Anza advisor mentioned the field of public health.
“He said, this is something you’d be interested in,” she said. “That’s what led me to public health and then when I got to UC Berkeley it reaffirmed that I didn’t want to go into medicine.”
Once at UC Berkeley, Afnani dove into her public health studies, taking not one but three senior capstone courses, which are classes with 30-40 public health students, much smaller than the average UC Berkeley undergraduate course.
“In my research methods class, the lecturer (Dr. Mahadar Tamene) was so amazing and she also got her MPH and PhD in epidemiology and reaffirmed that’s what I wanted to go into,” Afnani said.
She enjoyed that capstone course so much she took two others: advanced health policy with Dr. Robin Flagg and health care and public health management with Dr. Hector Rodriguez.
She also jumped at the opportunity to do research at UCSF, where she’s an undergraduate researcher at the Institute for Global Health Sciences under Dr. Mohsen Malekinejad. She’s currently working on a paper with the institute for which she will be given first author credit.
Afnani will continue to work with the UC Berkeley Labor Occupational Health Program as a social media and outreach coordinator over the summer, along with submitting her UCSF paper for publication, but come fall she’s committed to the MPH program in Epidemiology at UCLA, intent on building a network that stretches the length of the state.
She plans on staying in California, and after graduating with her MPH, “I hope I can be in some sort of leadership position at a nonprofit or local health center,” Afnani said. “I want to continue to do research in health inequities.”
Afnani is the Undergraduate Student Speaker at the 2026 UC Berkeley School of Public Health Commencement on Tuesday, May 19, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley’s Greek Theater.
