Ayah defended her dissertation entitled “Liberation Eugenics: African Americans and the Science of Black Freedom Struggles, 1890-1970” in 2021, and is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Ayah received her BA in International Studies (International Peace and Conflict Resolution) and History from American University in 2009. She received a dual Masters in History and Library Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2014. Her Masters’ thesis, “Race, Sexuality, and the ‘Progressive Physician’: African American Doctors, Eugenics, and Public Health, 1900-1940,” examined the ways in which African American doctors and scientists interpreted and deployed eugenic thought within the context of racial uplift ideology.  She was a Graduate Fellow in the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine in 2017-2018, and a Dissertation Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) in 2018-2019. Her work has been published in the Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Lancet, Nursing Clio, and Somatosphere, and she has appeared on the Disability History Association podcast and American History TV on C-Span.