Philadelphia physician aims to build a more accessible health-care system

What most distinguishes Said Aidid Ibrahim, MBA ’16—apart from his 6’8” height—is his appetite for change and challenge. “Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always wanted to grow,” says Ibrahim, who enrolled in MIT’s Sloan School of Management in his 50s, as a tenured professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of a health services research center at the Philadelphia VA hospital. 

Ibrahim was born in a Somali town near the Ethiopian border, where his family of 10 children subsisted on his father’s $100 monthly salary as a police officer. The local doctor was a Chinese man whom “everyone in the community admired,” Ibrahim recalls. “I remember thinking that I could find purpose by becoming a doctor.”

But his path was not smooth. At 22, he was recruited to play Division I basketball in Ohio but lost his spot on the team—and his scholarship—after a disappointing first practice. Determined not to return to Africa, he worked odd jobs and attended community college before transferring to Oberlin, where he met his future wife, Lee Erikson. The couple graduated in 1987 and moved to Philadelphia, Erikson’s home, where Ibrahim worked as a lab technician while studying for the MCAS. In 1999 they both began medical school at Case Western Reserve University. 

Ibrahim trained as an internist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital before serving at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and VA Hospital and Cornell University School of Medicine. Along the way, he completed a master’s at the Harvard School of Public Health before pursuing his MBA. “The US has some of the best health care in the world,” he says. “But it’s not always accessible to all. Especially the underserved. I needed to understand why, to form a clearer picture of the medical system, from the business and logistics side. And I needed to learn how to be a leader. My experience at MIT gave me that.”

In 2023, Ibrahim left his job at Northwell Health on Long Island to become dean of the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. It’s a good place, he says, to work on issues that can improve the way medicine is practiced and delivered: integrating a tsunami of new technologies and AI; overcoming a growing public skepticism of medicine and science; and motivating physicians, administrators, and policymakers to build a more equitable and accessible system. “There are definitely a lot of challenges in this new role,” he says. “But for me, happiness is mostly about being challenged.”