Efe Chantal Ghanney Simons grew up on the sunny coast of Ghana, West Africa. She graduated from Yale University where she double-majored in Chemistry and French. She then pursued her medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. While at Sinai, she founded several global health projects, including an international palliative care research project, that took place in her home country of Ghana, and has been presented at several national conferences. In recognition of her patient-centered compassionate care, Efe’s classmates elected her into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She also graduated with the Distinction in Medical Education Award.
Through her work with the African Research Academies for Women, Efe established fully-funded research internships for women in African universities, work that has had her share a stage with President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative and has had her awarded the President’s Volunteer Service Award by President Barack Obama.  Efe was invited by the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at Mount Sinai to join a team, partnering with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, to advise the Ghana Ministry of Health on the establishment of a national electronic health system, the first of its kind in Africa.
Efe is currently a urology resident at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she received the 2020 Excellence in Teaching with Humanism Residents and Fellows Award. Her career goal is to create urology training opportunities in Ghana, a country that as of 2014, had only eight urologists.  Additionally, she intends to strive to promote equity, diversity and inclusion in both the urology workforce as well as the patient population.