Noora Health

Edith Elliott

Edith Elliott is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, an international non-profit that improves patient outcomes and strengthens health systems through the power of family caregiving. Noora collaborates with hospitals and clinics in India and Bangladesh to equip patients’ loved ones with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to provide care at home confidently and effectively. Our work prevents newborn complications, reduces hospital readmissions, increases health-seeking behaviors, alleviates stress on health systems, and brings families and communities together.

Edith’s work is rooted in the belief that the best solutions in global health are often the simplest — and the most overlooked. She believes that everyone, everywhere, deserves the agency and human dignity associated with access to high quality healthcare, and that no one should suffer from a preventable condition. Having been a caregiver herself unexpectedly at a young age, she understands the universal feelings of confusion, anxiety, and distress that come with the work, and strives to infuse that level of empathy across Noora’s programs.

Prior to founding Noora, Edith was a Design Innovation Fellow and Entrepreneur Instructor at Stanford University, where she focused on the intersection of research, program implementation, and design thinking in global health. She has previously worked at the Aspen Institute and Population Services International to support efforts around infectious disease prevention. Her aspiration to drive population-level change began as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she received a bachelor’s degree in International Relations, then completed a masters in International Policy Studies and Global Health from Stanford. She has served as an Ashoka Fellow, Rainer Arnhold Fellow with the Mulago Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Affiliate Member and Associate Faculty at Ariadne Labs at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Shahed Alam is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, a non-profit organization that unleashes the power of patients and their family members by training them with skills to improve clinical outcomes, provide care, and save lives. Noora’s programs have reached nearly two million family caregivers across hundreds of hospitals and clinics in India and Bangladesh and have been shown to prevent newborn complications, reduce hospital readmissions, and increase health-seeking behaviors.

As the son of immigrants to the U.S., Shahed saw firsthand the barriers his family and other minorities faced while navigating the health system. He saw the struggles and triumphs of his own mother, who cared for his grandmother through a devastating neurological condition. It wasn’t until medical school that he began to understand the power of informal caregivers; people like his mother who work tirelessly to care for the people they love because there’s nowhere else to turn. From his first conversation with patients and families in the U.S. and in India, he observed the powerful role families could play as a core part of healthcare delivery. These indelible experiences shaped Noora’s core values: to lead with empathy and always begin by listening.

Prior to Noora, Shahed focused on research and advocacy to improve healthcare for incarcerated populations in the US, and he worked on developing low-cost technologies for better diagnostics in low- and middle-income settings. He holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering and a MHS in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, and an MD from Stanford University. He is an Associate Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a GLG Social Impact Fellow.