Dr. Fatima Khan, 36, is one of several candidates to apply for the school board seat left vacated by Kris Adair earlier this month.

School board candidate Dr. Fatima Khan is relatively new to Lawrence, but she’s no stranger to college towns and higher education. The Pakistan native, who originally came to the U.S. as an undergrad 18 years ago, has spent much of the past two decades on university campuses — both as a student and as an educator.

Now, just a few months after relocating to Lawrence from Kansas City, Khan is venturing into the world of public K-12 education, and she wants to lend her varied life experiences to the Lawrence schools that she says have continued to impress her since enrolling her kindergartner at Hillcrest Elementary School last fall.

“As a physician, as a mother, as a good citizen, I want to make sure that I’m giving back to the community,” Khan says.

Dr. Fatima Khan, 36, is one of several candidates to apply for the school board seat left vacated by Kris Adair earlier this month.

Khan, 36, said she studied biology at Truman State University before attending medical school at A.T. Still University, where she earned a doctor of osteopathy degree in 2009. She then completed an internship at Northeast Regional Medical Center in Kirksville, Mo., and an internal-medicine residency at the University of Missouri Health System in Columbia, Mo.

More recently, she’s been teaching medical residents at the Leavenworth VA Medical Center as site director of the University of Kansas’ Internal Medicine Residency Program.

As a school board member, Khan says she’d like to focus on strengthening the district’s gifted programs and graduation rates. Lawrence Public Schools saw slightly more than 90 percent of its students graduate in 2016, but Khan says she wants to bring that number as close to 100 percent as possible, with an emphasis on preparing students for college.

The American public school system is different from what she grew up with in Pakistan, Khan says. Still, she has nothing but “great things to say about Hillcrest,” which she says is comparable to the private school her son would have attended in Kansas City.

If appointed to the school board, Khan would serve as a voice, she says, for immigrant families and others who are new to Lawrence. She knows firsthand what a “learning process” it can be, and she’d like to help.

“I want to be able to participate and do what I can to represent the families that are coming from diverse backgrounds as well,” Khan says. “Getting them incorporated or integrated into the school system, or welcoming them into the school system, or being their voice — that’s important to me.”

The deadline to submit an application for the school board seat is 5 p.m. March 6. School board members will review applications at their March 13 meeting and then appoint one applicant to serve the remainder of Adair’s term, which ends on Jan. 8, 2018.