Usman Iqbal (SPH’03), chief medical officer for Julz Pharma, has been selected as the alumni speaker for the 2024 School of Public Health Convocation.

He has nearly two decades of experience across multiple sectors in the biopharmaceutical field, built on a foundation of academic training in health economics and multidisciplinary research. After graduating from medical college in Pakistan, Iqbal moved to Boston for graduate study and earned his MPH and MBA at BU en route to a career in pharmaceuticals.

Since then, he has worked for several of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies in various aspects of the industry: research and development; global medical affairs; and improving access to drug therapies for neuroscience, oncology, autoimmune diseases, and rare disorders. Iqbal also uses his expertise as a clinical development and medical affairs consultant for small biopharmaceutical companies and health care think tanks.

In a free-ranging conversation ahead of his presentation to students at the May 18, 2024 SPH Convocation, Iqbal says he believes the School’s emphasis on practical training is an important aspect of the SPH experience that should be expanded, if possible. Current MPH students are required to complete a minimum of 240 hours with an organization for their practicum, hours that may be completed in a single semester, or spread out over multiple semesters. 

Iqbal is also hoping to encourage the expansion of data science classes and entrepreneurship guidance to provide students a smoother transition into fields where they can leverage their public health training in new ways.

Are there ways that you incorporate what you learned at BU into some of your day-to-day activities?

I did a fellowship at BU after my MPH that was extremely useful, even to this day. I was a senior fellow at the Boston University Center for Assessment of Pharmaceutical Practice back in the early 2000s, a center set up by [professor emeritus] Dr. Lewis Kazis. I was there for four years, first as a fellow and then a senior fellow, because this was a unique arrangement where I went for my part-time MBA after my MPH at BU.

In order for me to continue to secure tuition reimbursement, I had to continue to be an employee of BU. So that’s why my fellowship was extended, and that was the best thing that could have happened to me, because in two years you can condition yourself with a good amount of research, but four years is what really solidifies you. So the research that I did at the school was very multi-disciplinary, cutting across health economics, using real-world evidence, working with big databases, patient-reported outcomes, quality of life. There was just a lot of groundbreaking, thoughtful research with different stakeholders.

We worked directly with the government—the VA, the CDC, the [Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality], as well as the [National Committee for Quality Assurance]. And then on the private side, we worked with a lot of biotechs and big pharmaceuticals on standard research and health outcomes projects.

You learn a lot during a fellowship—a traditional pharma researcher doesn’t usually go through that kind of a track. They go through a very standard academic environment, and then they usually go directly into the industry. So the level of rigor that you’re supposed to achieve during your time in school, that usually comes from spending a good amount of time with the material, and that’s something that I did.

With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight now, are there any things that you would change or add to the instruction you received?

I think I would encourage more of the practicum piece. There should be an opportunity within the school to be able to extend that practicum to six plus months. The world is really complex when it comes to any branch of public health, and sometimes three months is not enough to crystallize your thought process and link the actual real-world experience to the academic aspects that you’re learning.

It would also be good if more students had the ability, like I did, to be able to be involved in research as soon as you graduate. The school has such a huge platform across so much research. SPH has so many interesting grants, so many interesting topics, like climate health and housing. I mean, few schools of public health out there are actually doing that kind of research. The best option would be to absorb the same student population that’s studying in the school to be involved in that research on a full-time basis. The more practicum-oriented the school can get, the better.

What are some of the things that students can expect once they leave SPH, that might not be on their radar yet?

The first and most important thing is that they have to continue to learn. Learning doesn’t stop at graduation. It actually just moves into a different, translucent phase. Within a couple of years, they should have at least some understanding of what additional aspects they need to learn. And that should not be something that kind of takes them by surprise, that, “Oh, okay, I thought I was done with school, and I can just hang onto it until the next decade or so.” Public health is getting modernized at every level, so you want to chalk out an executive learning path as soon as possible.

The second aspect is, develop your own digital brand. You have to do it right away. And it can morph into a more sophisticated branding exercise later down the road—I’m still learning how to build my brand. These things sometimes don’t come to mind as students move into the professional phase, because naturally, one thinks, “Well, I have to learn a lot before I can think about branding myself.”

Building a brand and having a powerful digital presence, that just exposes you to a whole variety of different cultures, different people, your outreach basically extends to the world. Otherwise, you just stick to work and your ecosystem in which you are in, which is probably the city that you’re living in.

Did it take a while for that realization to set in? Was that one of the things that you found that you had to learn once you left?

My case probably is not the best case because we never had those digital tools, we never had that digital world. I mean, we were just exposing ourselves to the internet when we graduated. Now we have all these social networking platforms, we have LinkedIn. And then especially post-COVID, a lot of the professional world has simply gone virtual. The realization came late to me because of the fact that the world that we moved into after graduation was not a digital world.

But as soon as it became that way, it still took me a few years to realize I need to have a digital brand. So I’ve been working on it for the last four to five years. Because while you can create your own philosophy, while you can create your own persona around your brand, it has to be aligned with where the world is going— otherwise you can become irrelevant very, very quickly.

What are some of the ways students can be encouraged to build that presence once they’re at SPH, so that they have the foundation started for when they want to take off in their careers?

There could be a whole new paradigm shift in the school’s offerings towards this aspect of students building their own digital brand, with the school providing all of the tools, the resources and guidance for that, with the goal that as soon as they graduate, students have an actual brand in place.