Sarah Assian

Chicago, IL

Physician Assistant, Cook County Health

Scaling sustainable, standardized HIV care infrastructure and advancing health equity by building cross-sector coalitions.

Sarah is a physician assistant specializing in HIV and infectious disease at Cook County Health, where she provides safety-net clinical care to Chicago’s most vulnerable populations and contributes to standardized HIV education for medical trainees. She delivers direct clinical care to a largely uninsured and underinsured patient population and introduces how to medically manage HIV to over 100 medical residents and students each year. Her approach reframes severe health disparities as system-design problems rather than patient failures, and she has extended her work beyond the clinic as a co-investigator on research studies in HIV care through partnerships with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Through the Scholars Program, Sarah plans to deepen her understanding of healthcare policy and cross-sector coalition building to scale evidence-based approaches to HIV care infrastructure across the state of Illinois.