Meet Khadicha K. (she/her), a 1,000 Dreams Fund Scholarship winner who is studying Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University.

What is your dream?

My dream for the future is that the scientific mystery of why 80% of autoimmune disease patients are female would be solved, and that there would be a way which STEM can be freely accessed throughout the entire world.

I am not sure what my concrete dream for myself is anymore. In general, I am extremely passionate about autoimmune disease research. My younger brother passed away to sepsis due to complications in development, as my mother had an autoimmune disease while pregnant. 80% of autoimmune patients are female, which is a staggering statistic. This sex bias of autoimmune disease is practically a scientific mystery still. Though there are incredible theories, I would love to focus more energy on this issue. I researched this mystery in multiple university labs, and each time it felt even more fulfilling, and each time I learned the gaps in the field which need to be addressed.

Lately, I have been really trying to understand what my specific dream is for me, and more importantly, how I leave the world. I live and breathe science, and I guess my final goal would be to contribute to the scientific world, and therefore, the world! Additionally, I would like to make STEM more accessible for the underserved.

When thinking about my future and the incredible things I want to do, I find myself often coming back to how I can go back to my home country and bring whatever I have done to help develop and inspire youth, especially girls. Whether I go one route or another is especially unclear right now, but I am so excited to figure it out, and extremely thankful for incredible organizations like these which allow me the space to do so.

My dream, like everyone else’s, at the end of the day is to impact the Earth. I am so inspired by all of the incredible people I have met thus far, which have cultivated thousands of dreams for what I want the future to look like and how I can contribute to that.

Please share a short quote that tells us how you feel about the win and what impact it will have on your career.

This is such a humbling and proud moment. I have based my entire life around wanting to prove that women are equally capable, whether it be in terms of achievement or the need for more recognition in research — which all roots back to proving my patriarchal culture wrong. To be awarded this shows that my efforts are being appreciated. This scholarship will allow me to achieve my nonprofit and research dreams, through providing the funds to do so.

​What advice do you have for other young women who are wanting to pursue their dreams?

Do the big crazy things. If you get hate or discouragement, congrats, you’re on the right track! With that, some general advice is if you have a big dream and don’t truly know where to begin, start incredibly small. Want to start a nonprofit? Want to start a research program? Find one person, one organization, one outlet, for you to connect with for some help. Though that help may not stick around, it will act as an anchor in the beginning stages of your project, giving you the sense of confidence to keep going.

I was just at a conference where the brilliant Ousmane Kabre roughly said something around the lines of, “a dream without action is just a dream”. Having dreams is incredible, and I encourage every person to have as many as possible, but acting on them is what differentiates you from everyone. A small step is still a step!

Also, we often fall into this facade where we put the opposite gender on a pedestal. This is how we are conditioned. To quote recent research on the differences in male and female brains, “The human brain is not ‘sexually dimorphic.” I think when you exit this conditioned way of thinking, you leave imposter syndrome behind. Again, this is a concept deeply formed by societal and cultural norms, but is not accurate.

Eliot, L., Ahmed, A., Khan, H., & Patel, J. (2021). Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 125, 667–697. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.02.026