Zaid Bilgrami, MD, Diagnostic Radiology Resident

It’s the same thread, beginning with the house I was born in. I saw medicine being used to help the neediest members of the population, and that has continued to inspire me.

Zaid Bilgrami spent the first years of his life in Hyderabad, India. His family home had a garage, but they didn’t use it for cars; instead, it served as a medical clinic. Bilgrami’s earliest memories include seeing people lined up outside his house to have their infections and other health problems treated by his grandfather, a tropical disease specialist. The patients who could afford to paid a small fee, which covered the supplies and operating expenses that his grandfather needed to help those who could not afford to pay anything.

“I was introduced to medicine at a very young age through that clinic,” says Bilgrami, now a third-year radiology resident at Columbia. “I was also introduced to the idea of using medicine to serve humanity, specifically to serve the most disadvantaged members of society who often need the most help.”

His grandfather passed away a year ago, but the clinic continues to operate out of the family garage in India. For Bilgrami, who moved to the United States when he was still a young child, his grandfather’s legacy is personal. Every step of his journey through college, medical school, and residency has been informed by the question of how best to help people who slip through the cracks of the medical system.

“It’s the same thread, beginning with the house I was born in,” he says. “I saw medicine being used to help the neediest members of the population, and that has continued to inspire me.”

As Bilgrami looked for ways to make an impact through medicine, radiology was not the first thing that came to mind. He fell in love with the specialty on a rotation. “You’re constantly thinking, evaluating different pieces of evidence against each other, and you’re putting together the clinical picture. I really liked that,” he says.

Initially, he grappled with how to continue his commitment to helping the underserved through a specialty where interaction with patients is minimal. But his thinking quickly evolved.

“There’s this perception that radiologists don’t directly help patients,” he says. “But we play such an important role in the overall arc of a patient’s care. Reading scans for the neediest patients, I’m having a huge impact on their care, even though I’m not directly interacting with them.”

Bilgrami chose Columbia for his residency partly because of its location in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, an area with a large, local population of complex patients, many of whom do not have the resources to adequately manage their healthcare. Since he began his residency, he has expanded his impact well beyond the day-to-day work of reading scans and is now the resident liaison to RAD-AID International for Columbia Radiology’s global health program in Guyana. In this role, he is harnessing the power of education to impact the population of a country he has yet to visit.

Each month, Bilgrami organizes his co-residents to present lectures and case conferences to their peers at the Georgetown Public Hospital, where radiology education is still relatively new, and resources are limited. By sharing both cases and knowledge virtually from New York City, Bilgrami and his co-residents play a critical role in Guyanese resident education, which then trickles down to better care for the patients they serve.

One example Bilgrami points to is the MRI cases they present, despite the fact that there is no MRI at the hospital in Guyana. Bilgrami sees tremendous value in exposing the Guyanese residents to MRI, because they can see things on the scans that aren’t visible on X-ray or CT. “By showing them MRI, we remove the veil, and then the X-rays and CTs they see each day make more sense,” he says. “It helps them read their scans better.”

This year, Bilgrami, who has been tutoring and teaching since he was 18 years old, won Columbia Radiology’s Resident Teacher of the Year Award. He plans to travel in person to Guyana during his fourth year of residency, when he feels he’ll have the most to offer. “If I help one radiologist become a better radiologist,” he says, “that radiologist is going to read thousands and thousands of scans and help thousands of people over the course of their career.”