Niisoja Torto

Niisoja Torto, from Gainesville, Florida, is pursuing an MD at Stanford School of Medicine. He earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University. As a future community- and policy-oriented physician, Niisoja aspires to collaborate with members of underserved communities to advance health equity and catalyze policy change. At Duke, his health advocacy journey took him from rural central Uganda, where he worked alongside community members to develop a sustainable hypertension prevention and monitoring program, to the Department of Nutrition at the World Health Organization in Geneva, where he helped craft global policy guidance in United Nations reports. His research at the interface of food and health has also been published in the BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. Niisoja is a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow and a recipient of Duke’s Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship.