Ali Abazeed
Ali Abazeed
Ali Abazeed is the City of Dearborn’s Chief Public Health Officer, Founding Director of the Dearborn Department of Public Health (DPH), and a faculty member at Wayne State University in Detroit.
A Dearborn native, he moved home from Washington, D.C., in April 2022, where he served as a Public Health Advisor at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He joined public service as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) and has worked across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Secretary, Office of Refugee Resettlement, and the Assistant Secretary for Policy and Evaluation. He has led a health and social policy portfolio ranging from homelessness eradication, the health of rural and tribal America, cancer prevention and control, and mitigating the effects of the global refugee crisis. Before joining the federal government, Ali served as an advisor at the Detroit Health Department, where he bolstered efforts to reverse water shutoffs and revitalize human services following the city’s bankruptcy. He developed robust comparative perspectives working on maternal and child health with the United Nations in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Ali is a three-time graduate of the University of Michigan, earning an MPH, MPP, and BS.
DPH was formally launched in April 2022, and Dearborn is just the second city in Michigan with a formal health department and the first to launch one voluntarily. DPH is piloting a health-in-all-policies approach, a collaborative approach that integrates and articulates health considerations into policymaking across sectors to improve the health of the Dearborn public.