I nside every living cell are bacteria that burrow past the body’s defenses and vanish into its own machinery.
Zahra Nizami has spent years learning to find them.
A fourth-year PhD student at UC Berkeley and an Al-Huda School Class of 2015 alumna, she studies the mechanisms by which infectious bacteria hide, hijack, and persist inside human cells. Rickettsia parkeri, to be exact.
“My research isn’t going to produce a medicine tomorrow,” Zahra said. It is the unheralded, indispensable labor laying the groundwork for advancements in bacterial treatment.
In science, she says, most things do not work. Experiments fail. Tools are missing. Questions sit unanswered for years. It is during those stretches that Zahra reaches for her father’s words, “Everything is Allah’s knowledge, so everything is worth studying.”
“We are not truly discovering anything.Knowledge is not something you conquer. We are meant to have portions of Allah’s knowledge unveiled to us at specific times.”
–Zahra Nizami,
Al-Huda School Class of 2015 alumna
Her advice to younger Muslim students is to keep your intentions pure, maintain your Muslim identity with confidence, and remember that your deen is not something to dilute in order to fit in.
“Visible Muslim role models in science matter because younger students entering those spaces need to see someone they can look up to,” she said.
Muslim and scientist are not mutually exclusive.
It was her Al-Huda high school biology teacher, Sr. Shabana Sharief, who said it first, and Zahra is still proving it.
