The steadiest handsin the room are oftenat the head of the bed.

Ima's story begins far from the institutions she now helps lead. Hometown, childhood and the household that raised her, in her own words Everything since has been built by hand.

She trained in the specialties that own the most dangerous parts of surgery: anesthesiology for the minutes on the table, critical care for the days after, and the heart, the hardest organ to do either for. Her early work at Tufts Medical Center, published as Two Tales of Cardiomyopathy with veterinary cardiologists, argued for the One Health idea that human and animal medicine are one problem. She also earned an MPH and an MHS, and the public health training changed the scale of her questions.

Global health is critical care at the scale of a country.

Today she is Assistant Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Associate Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She directs the Johns Hopkins Global Alliance of Perioperative Professionals (JHU-GAPP), and with Global Surgery University leads the JHU Global Surgery Academic Scholar Program (GSAS), with five tracks: clinical research, health systems, surgical education, data and registry, and policy and financing. She leads the StAAR-funded assessment of increased oxygen access at the Edward Francis Small Teaching Hospital in Banjul, The Gambia. In 2026 she presented the G4 Alliance's WHO-supported multinational surgical registry at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health. Foundation courses under her direction have trained more than 200 providers in Liberia and The Gambia since 2022. Her oxygen-access research in Liberia and The Gambia is published in the Journal of Global Surgery.

AthleticsMD began with her. She is a decorated rugby player and an award-winning NPC competitor, a two-time Maryland state champion in 2022, in Women's Physique and in Figure. The practice was first built to prevent sudden death among bodybuilders, and it kept growing from there. She is its co-founder and Chief Medical Director, and she runs the academic and clinical side of its global work: perioperative and critical care training, the oxygen-access research programme, and the evidence that work is judged on.

Her most recent first-author paper, on methadone in older adults having cardiac surgery, follows the same instinct she brings to everything else: take a drug many clinicians are wary of, and measure whether it is safe for the patients most at risk.