Mohamed Aburawi is a surgeon turned health-tech entrepreneur with an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Center for Public Leadership Fellow and Edward S. Mason Fellow. He also received an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2017 Mohamed founded Speetar, an AI-enabled telehealth platform awarded by Harvard and supported by MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund. Piloted in Libya and currently being scaled across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, Speetar links under-served patients in low resource settings to a global pool of cultural and language-matched medical specialists.
Speetar represents a disruptive healthcare model, breaking down economic, social, and geographic barriers that too often limit the options patients have when seeking quality medical care. During the coronavirus pandemic, Speetar’s COVID-19 Platform, a newly developed rapid response solution helped triage patients and mitigate resource limitations in war-torn Libya. The partnerships built with local health authorities enabled an unprecedented centralization of national data collection & analytics generation.
Prior to launching Speetar, Mohamed worked at Harvard Medical School’s Center of Engineering in Medicine as a senior researcher where he led the design and development of a novel discarded human kidney reconditioning system, utilizing non-blood based ex-vivo organ perfusion (first in the USA); The cutting edge work he innovated is paving the way for a ground-breaking multi-center clinical trial supported by the New England Organ Bank.
In 2018, Mohamed was named one of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation GoalKeepers, and an Ashoka Visionary in recognition for his efforts leveraging digital technologies to enable healthcare delivery in low resource settings. In 2019 he was awarded the Harvard Medical School Dean’s Community Service Award and most recently was selected as an Aspen Institue Fellow and a Fellow at the MIT Legatum Center of Development and Entrepreneurship.
Mohamed’s passion for improving global healthcare outcomes continues to place him at the intersection of technology, business, and medicine. His work has been featured by Forbes, the BBC, Aljazeera, PRI, PRX, WGBH, and StartupScene MENA among other local and global outlets. When he’s not in scrubs or (trying to) keep up with his new-found fatherhood, Mohamed is in the air flying a Cessna-150 over the clouds of New England.