Beyond the Symptom: Healing the System

I'm Ada Erdem, an IB Diploma candidate at Bilkent Laboratory & International School (BLIS) in Ankara, Class of 2027. I'm interested in cardiology, health policy, and how cities shape health.

I was born in New York and grew up in Ankara. I attended DoDEA Ankara from kindergarten through Grade 5, then moved to BLIS.

I've spent two summers, along with school breaks, shadowing at Ankara University's Heart Center. During a transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE), I watched a patient struggle in distress. The doctors stayed calm and kept reassuring them, and the patient's panic gave way to trust. That is the kind of physician I want to be: one with the clinical skill to treat complex conditions, and the steadiness to stay with patients through their most vulnerable moments.

Beyond the clinic, I study how the places we live and the systems we rely on shape our health. My first-author commentary, The City as Prescription, was published in Cities & Health in October 2026 and selected as the journal’s Lead Article. My first-author viewpoint, The Urban Vegetation Triage Model, published in Anthropocene (Elsevier) in October 2026, asks whether an invasive tree can serve as shade infrastructure in semi-arid cities. In November 2026, my first-author commentary Bridging the Gap in Public Healthcare was published online in Health Policy and Technology (Elsevier); it proposes a legal framework that would let patients send structured follow-up questions to their doctors through Turkey’s e-Nabız system. I’m also first author of a cardiology case report now in peer review, and I’m writing up an independent computational study of a cardiac gene variant. (See Research.) 

Ada Erdem

Ankara, Türkiye | ada.erdem2021@gmail.com

ORCID: 0009-0007-5662-5842