About
I spend my days looking into other people's eyes and my evenings trying to look past my own.
I'm a physician-writer and an eye surgeon. I write about vision and its failures—in clinic, in community, and in myself—and about the arbitrary ways we decide a life has been well spent.
I'm drawn to the moral crossroads we face in medicine and to the questions our broken system would rather not ask.
As a second-generation American, born in New York to Pakistani parents and raised in the deep South, I keep returning to migrant and refugee stories—in and out of medicine—the need for ethnic and religious identity, and what these journeys cost the people who make them.
Tayyeba Kanwal Ali, MD
is a board-certified ophthalmologist and the Associate Director of Stanford Physician Writers, a physician writing community modeled on the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She sees cornea and uveitis patients at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and holds an adjunct associate professorship at Stanford School of Medicine. From 2018 to 2025 she consulted on immunology and eye disease for Google and Verily Life Sciences, work that was driven by an interest in using technology to re-humanize medicine.
Her writing has appeared in Analyst News, Ophthalmology, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and other journals and textbooks, and she has lectured nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the Women in Ophthalmology Humanitarian Award and has been recognized as a thought leader in ophthalmology and health technology.
She trained at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute—ranked the top eye hospital in the country by U.S. News & World Report—completing fellowships in cornea, external disease, and refractive surgery, and in uveitis.She earned her medical degree from Emory University School of Medicine and a degree in English literature and creative writing from Agnes Scott College.
You can find Tayyeba on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.