UNC infectious disease fellow Jessica Lin marks a first for ID fellowship program
January 5, 2009 -- Jessica Lin, a Maryland native who will be starting as an infectious diseases fellow in the fall, has been awarded a Pfizer Centennial Travel Award in Basic Science Tropical Disease Research from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).
Jessica Lin, MD"This may be the first time that a UNC ID Fellow receives an award before she formally starts," says fellowship director and UNC professor of medicine Dr. Charles van der Horst. The award is given to individuals with doctoral-level degrees for travel to laboratories in the tropics to pursue studies in molecular, cellular or immunological aspects of tropical infectious diseases.
Lin, who is completing her internal medicine training at the University of California, San Diego, first became interested in global health when when she spent a semester in Harbin, China while completing her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biochemistry at Yale.
As a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, she cultivated a keen interest in infectious diseases. "I couldn't get enough of all the exciting cases at Ben Taub County hospital," Lin says.
Since medical school, she has traveled to several developing countries to learn more about tropical medicine, including Iquitos, Peru to study vivax malaria, northeastern rural Thailand to learn about public health surveillance and to central and southwestern China to treat patients with HIV/AIDS.
This year she is assisting a study on malaria drug resistance in Cambodia with the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS), based in Bangkok.
Dr. Lin speaks fluent Mandarin, broken Spanish,and is working on her Thai. She is looking forward to beginning her ID training at UNC.
For more on the UNC ID fellowship program, visit http://www.id.unc.edu/fellowship.htm.
For more on the Pfizer Centennial Award visit: http://www.astmh.org/funding/centennialapp.cfm.
Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases contact: Lisa Chensvold, (919) 843-5719, lisa_chensvold@med.unc.edu.
