ApolloMD Awards 2025 Emergency Medicine Scholarship to Texas Resident Dr. Omar Haggaz

Dr. Omar Haggaz, a fourth-year medical resident at the Sam Houston State College of Osteopathic Medicine in Texas, is the 2025 recipient of ApolloMD's Emergency Medicine Scholarship.

Ask Dr. Haggaz what he loves about emergency medicine, and he will reference any number of early influences, medical-school mentors and in-the-trenches experiences that span from his childhood to his ongoing interests in medical technology and underserved patient populations.

"The first person who opened my eyes to the field of medicine was my dad, who worked as a medical technologist in a lab," says Dr. Haggaz, 27, who will graduate from medical school in 2025. "He used to take me into the field with him when I was little."

While studying biomedical science from 2016-2019 as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Haggaz also volunteered at Parkland Memorial Hospital, site of one of the country's busiest emergency departments.

"It was a definitive moment for me," says Haggaz, 27. "I was fascinated by the amount of research they were doing at Parkland while also caring for an underserved population. I remember one patient who waited for nine hours and then had to leave the ER without being seen because he had to go to work."