About Naa Asheley

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey is a writer and aspiring physician-scientist originally from Chicago. She is a 2021 Graduate from the University of Chicago where she received her Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing with honors, specializing in fiction and a minor in the biological sciences. From 2021-2024, she was a  PROPEL Post-Bacc Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, where she spent three years doing full time research in topics related to  cancer immunology and cancer immunotherapy.

Her works have been published in Broken Antler Magazine, Euphony Journal, The /tƐmz/ Review, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, The Xylom and more.  She is passionate about increasing the intersection between the humanities and STEM, and has been involved/led organizations aimed at advocating and making academia more accessible and equitable for underrepresented minority students.

She is currently a 1st Year MD-PhD Student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is interested in studying the intersection of cancer immunology and autoimmunity and using a systems immunology approach to better understand the unique biological differences in the tumor microenvironment compared to the chronically inflamed microenvironment of various autoimmune diseases, and how that informs disease progression.