Joel Bervell is a third year Ghanaian-American medical student at Washington State University, Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. He is the co-founder of Hugs for, a non-profit that is dedicated to empowering the next generation of high school global leaders. Today, Hugs has mobilized hundreds of youth volunteers and fundraised over $500,000 worth of material gifts and monetary donations and successfully planned trips to Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.

In 2017, Joel graduated from Yale University, where he earned a BA in Molecular Cellular Developmental Biology. There, Joel served as an elected member of Yale student government, and director of a longitudinal mentorship program based in low-income neighborhoods. After graduating, he completed a Masters in Medical Science at Boston University and spent a year working as a clinical research assistant at Providence Hospital researching best treatment modalities for appendicitis.

At Washington State University, Joel served as Medical Student Council President and the co-founder and president of a chapter of the Student National Medical Association. He is also the founder and director of the Coug Health Academic Mentoring Program (CHAMP), a mentoring program dedicated to increasing the number of underrepresented students interested in medicine. Joel is committed to fighting health disparities in medicine through education and regularly shares topics about racial disparities/ biases in healthcare and other industries on his TikTok and Instagram (@joelbervell) where his platforms have over 300,000+ combined followers and 17,000,000+ impressions. He has been invited to speak on panels at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Clinton Foundation, Verizon, Open Society Foundations, Bank of America, General Electric and Coca-Cola. He has also spoken on well-known local and national media outlets including NPR, WebMd, regularly produces digital media content for Aljazeera and Brut Media, and has published work in prestigious academic journals such as the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. He currently is working with the World Health Organization’s Digital Communications and a collection of health professionals combatting the spread of misinformation on social media about COVID-19, and on a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion project with the VA Hospital systems.

Joel is the recipient of the National Medical Association Emerging Scholar Award, the highest academic honor presented to a student by the National Medical Association. He was selected as one of 100 inaugural TikTok for Black Creatives, and is the recipient of the AdColor Awards. He has served in an advisory role on the boards of multiple organizations including the National Student Response Network, Hope in A Box, and the Ron Brown Leaders Network Council.