Office of Belonging, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Idara is originally from the California Bay Area, and is proud to be one of four children of Nigerian immigrants. She earned a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience at Brown, and worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard before returning to Providence for medical school.

Having served as an academic and social peer adviser as an undergraduate, Idara was eager to rekindle that role as an ODMA fellow. “People of color and folks underrepresented in medicine [URiM] have to navigate a lot of things alone,” both in general and in medical school, she says. “I wanted to work with students, to be a resource for them. I enjoy taking whatever I’ve learned and sharing with other folks to make their lives easier.”

Idara led peer-tutoring sessions, known as TEAM (Together Everyone Achieves More), for first-year URiM students. Right away she made an impact on the program, diversifying the pool of second-year students who would serve as tutors.

“First-year students come in and they’re not familiar with navigating the Medical School,” she explains. “Having second-year students who look like them, who share similar experiences, and can guide them through was really important.” Idara recruited about a dozen URiM second-years as tutors. “They played a really big role in helping teach the first-year students and facilitate their learning,” she says.

Idara also led discussions about race in medicine and the impacts of racism in scientific research as part of the BASCE (Brown Advocates for Social Change and Equity) fellowship, a year-long ODMA program for medical students, residents, and faculty. She created her own lectures on topics like grind culture and getting enough sleep. “That was fun turning those things into lectures, things that I found important, and to be able to discuss that with residents and attendings who’d hopefully teach it to their students,” she says.

Her year as an ODMA fellow allowed Idara to meet a number of personal and professional goals, like doing more public speaking, developing curricula, and bringing student concerns to faculty and administrators. “I like being the one to make decisions,” Idara says. “In the fellowship you can execute your own ideas, rather than take them to someone else to do it.”

After her fellowship, Idara completed a family and emergency medicine rotation on Block Island. She is now applying to emergency medicine residencies programs, and she hopes to continue her academic medicine and DEI work in her training and her career. “The ODMA fellowship helped shape the trajectory that I want to take in whatever professional endeavors I have,” Idara says.