Biography | Javid Abdelmoneim — The Cruciform Where a Cambridge-Born Student Finished Medicine

People meet Javid Abdelmoneim as the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières.

The paper trail starts on Gower Street, in the red-brick Cruciform that UCL Medical School still uses as a teaching building.

He was born in Cambridge around 1979 to Sudanese and Iranian parents.

He spent his first years in Khartoum, then came back to Cambridge for school.

By his second year at University College London he was already volunteering with MSF's Access Campaign, the arm of the movement that argued for cheaper medicines for neglected diseases.

That sequence is the one he and MSF UK have both put on the public record.

He graduated in medicine from UCL in 2003.

The Cruciform is the right pin for that finish line. Alfred Waterhouse designed it as University College Hospital.

The wards closed in 1995. UCL bought the building and turned it into preclinical teaching space and the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research.

A student who walked these corridors in the early 2000s was not walking a working hospital.

He was walking a former hospital that had been rebuilt as a school.

After the degree came emergency-medicine training in the NHS, Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, and a diploma in tropical medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine a few streets away.

The international missions did not begin here. The medical identity did.

Photo: gavnosis, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons