Saja Abusulttan

Saja Abusulttan is a PhD candidate at Erasmus MC on the project, "Migration, Organ Trade and Transplantation: exploring the health-related harms and needs of people who sell their kidneys and of patients suffering from end-stage-renal-disease in a migration context" (2025-2029).  Saja is supervised by Prof. Dr. Dennis Hesselink, Dr. Emma Massey and Dr. Frederike Ambagtsheer.

From September 2022-2023, Saja Abusulttan worked as an intern on the research project 'Organs as a Gateway to Europe', where she conducted a scoping review on kidney sale in a migration context. From September 2023 until August 2024 she worked as a research assistant on the (Dis)Incentives project.

She obtained her first Master's Degree in Dental Public Health from the University of Sheffield in the UK and her Bachelor Degree in Dentistry from Al-Azhar University in Palestine. She completed her second Master's in Global Health at the University of Maastricht (UM) in 2023. She wrote her master's thesis on mental health care and needs among female refugees and asylum seekers living in Dutch refugee camps.

Her personal background as a refugee with double displacement and her newly obtained knowledge from her first master have motivated her to follow her second master and research on global health issues in migration context. She was also a member in the Diversity, Decolonization, and Belonging Committee of Global Health at UM. During her second Master's studies, she was selected for the PREMIUM Excellence Program at UM where she worked on the Student Service Centre's Refugee Project: ELPEEDA.