Yalda Shahram spent the first several years of her life in Tehran, Iran, before moving to the United States. Her culture shock resulted in a unique self awareness that formed her identity; "I belong to no single country, I have no single culture, I speak and think in no single language."

While completing residency at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, she supported steps to reduce health disparities and promote health equity through Community Benefits. In her year as Chief Resident in Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center, she continued this work by developing a curriculum on "Understanding Health Disparities." Intersections with today's society reflect a need to reduce disparities and promote equity; Angela Y. Davis writes, “any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal.” Looking upstream at societal, environmental, and institutional inequities is necessary in order to make a difference downstream. Her objective in education is not only to raise awareness, but also to promote tools to help mitigate change. Paulo Freire teaches: “when you dare to analyze and name our world through critical thinking, when we speak about our aspirations and right, when we use language to name our realities and hopes, we are in fact re-making and re-naming the world in our imagination as a prelude to what is to come.”

She started her career as an Academic Hospitalist at UCSF in the Fall of 2018.