Born Fatima Shani Cody, Stanford was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She completed her early education at Benjamin Elijah Mays High School where she was valedictorian of her high school class and earned over $1.2 million in college scholarship offers.
She has been a health communications fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a behavioral sciences intern at the American Cancer Society. Upon completion of her MPH, she received the Gold Congressional Award, the highest honor that Congress bestows upon America's youth presented by her Congressman John Lewis. Stanford also completed a medicine and media internship at the Discovery Channel. Before medical school, she worked as a prevention co-ordinator for the Dekalb Rape Crisis Center, renamed the Day League, in metro Atlanta where she was a consultant to the National Center for Victims of Crime. Prior to the American Medical Association vote to acknowledge obesity as a disease, Stanford was its keynote speaker. Her work in obesity medicine and gender pay disparities has been covered by the lay press in outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, Time, Self, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, PBS, PopSugar, Refinery29, Business Insider, Marie Claire, The New Zealand Herald, South China Morning Post, and several others. She has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles on obesity and disparities as a research scientist in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Circulation, JAMA Pediatrics, International Journal of Obesity, Obesity, and British Journal of Sports Medicine. She is a lecturer on obesity in the United States and around the world. Stanford is the author of Facing Overweight and Obesity, a book for adults and children with overweight and obesity.
Organizational involvement
While at Emory University, she became a member of the Omicron Xi chapter of Delta Sigma Theta where she was selected as Southern Region Collegiate Soror of the year before becoming a Diamond Life Member. She was the first black president of the Inter-sorority Council at Emory University and first black class president of the Medical College of GeorgiaSchool of Medicine. She founded the second state chapter of the Association of Women Surgeons in Georgia while she was a first-year medical student. She is the former Junior Doctor's Network socio-medical affairs officer for the World Medical Association, American Medical Association Minority Affairs Section At-large member, American College of Physicians Academic Advisory Board and Education and Publication Committee Member and Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Physicians Governor's Council Member, The Obesity Society Advocacy Committee Co-Chair, Massachusetts Medical Society Nutrition and Physical Activity Chair, American Board of Obesity Medicine Outreach and Awareness Committee. To help address harassment and inequity in healthcare, she became a founding member of Time's Up Healthcare.
Awards and honors
An American Medical Association Foundation Leadership Award recipient in 2005, an AMA Paul Ambrose Award for national leadership among resident physicians in 2009, she was selected for the AMA Inspirational Physician Award in 2015. The American College of Physicians selected her as the 2013 recipient of the Joseph E. Johnson Leadership Award and the selected her for the Young Leadership Award in 2015. In 2016, she was named to the National Minority Quality Forum Top 40 Under 40. She was named to the Emory University Inaugural Top 40 under 40. She is the 2017 recipient of the Harvard Medical School Amos Diversity Award and Massachusetts Medical Society Award for Women's Health. The Massachusetts Medical Society selected her as the 2019 Suffolk District Community Clinician of the Year and for the 2019 Reducing Health Disparities Award. At Massachusetts General Hospital, she is a physician scientist development award recipient. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians, American Heart Association, and The Obesity Society.
On October 30, 2018, Stanford traveled on flight DL 5935 on Delta Airlines operated by their partner, Republic Airline, on a direct flight into Boston Logan International Airport. On this flight, Stanford sought to provide care to a fellow passenger seated in her immediate vicinity when her validity as a medical doctor was questioned by the flight attendants aboard despite presenting her Board of Registration in Medicine active license for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. After her initial tweet about the incident, it became a national and international news story covered by major news outlets such as NBC News, The New York Times, CNN, and Fortune
