Student global health awards round-up
September 28, 2009 -- The Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases proud to highlight the students and trainees who have received prestigious awards and fellowships. The institute is training non-UNC students from around the country in sub-Saharan Africa. UNC students have garnered awards to study and train in Malawi, Nicaragua, and Kenya.
Charles Vorkas and Jonathan Samuel have already shared some of their experiences via the institute blog, here and here. Keep watching for more updates and reports from our talented and dedicated students.
Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship
The Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship (ICRF) is a national award program sponsored by UNC. The Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases administers programs in Malawi and China. This year UNC awarded three fellowships.
Emilia Campbell is a medical student at Johns Hopkins University. She will go to Malawi to work with Call to Action, a program for prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV at UNC Project-Malawi in Lilongwe, Malawi. Specifically, Campbell will study family planning choices in post-partum women and toxicities related to antiretroviral therapy during pregnancy. After medical school, she plans to do her residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
Maria Keating of Cornell University will also spend her fellowship year working at UNC Project-Malawi. Her primary project involves looking at rates of HIV seroconversion during pregnancy. While conducting HIV testing on the labor ward, Keating will also be examining women's perceptions of HIV testing. Keating is preparing for a career in maternal-child health combining obstetrics and gynecology with global health research.
Kai Sun is a medical student at Washington University in Saint Louis who will be working at the China CDC on a data analysis studying mortality, comparing HIV infection alone vs. HIV/TB co-infection patients, and multi-drug resistant TB. She will also be researching hepatitis prevalence among high risk groups in China: men who have sex with men (MSM), plasma donors, sex workers and HIV patients.
Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars and Fellows (FICRS/F)
The NIH/Fogarty International Center’s FICRS/F program supports one year of mentored clinical research in a developing country. There are 36 official program sites. UNC has sites in Nanjing, China and Lilongwe, Malawi.
Pre-graduate Program (Scholars)
Helena Chang, a medical student at the University of Wisconsin, will work with the National Center for STD & Leprosy Control (NCSTDLC) in Nanjing, under the mentorship of Myron Cohen, director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, and Xiang-sheng Chen, MD, PhD, professor and deputy director at the NCSTDLC. Her research will focus on HIV testing uptake when offered in conjunction with rapid syphilis testing in three cities in Guangzhou province. She will also research condom use patterns among female sex workers in Southern China.
Anne E. Rositch, a doctoral student in epidemiology at UNC, will spend the next year in Nairobi, Kenya where she will work on a study that focuses on human papillomavirus, cervical pre-cancerous lesions and HIV transmission. At a site sponsored by the University of Washington and The University of Nairobi, Rositch will work under the mentorship of Jennifer Smith, PhD, UNC research assistant professor of epidemiology. Rositch will be involved in all aspects of the study and hopes to conduct HIV testing and counseling in the University of Nairobi's infectious disease and HIV clinic.
Charles Vorkas, a student at Weill Cornell Medical College, will work at UNC Project-Malawi under the mentorship of Charles van der Horst, MD, professor of medicine and Mina Hosseinipour MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine, both at UNC.
Zhi Xiang, who is an MD/PhD candidate at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, will also work at the NCSTDLC under the direction of Myron Cohen and Xiang-sheng Chen.
Postgraduate Program (Fellows)
Elizabeth Bigger, MD, a medical resident at Vanderbilt University, will work at UNC Project-Malawi under the mentorship of Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at UNC. Bigger will research the correlation between risk factors and type of cancer, stage at diagnosis and co-infections including HIV and hepatitis B/C in the oncology clinic at Kamuzu Central Hospital.
Jonathan Samuel MD, MPH, is a general surgery resident at UNC who is also spending his fellowship year at UNC Project-Malawi. Utilizing preliminary data collected in a trauma registry Samuel created at Kamuzu Central Hospital during 2008-2009, Samuel will study the immune response to burns in relation to both burn size and HIV status. He will also conduct an observational study of burn care to identify ways to improve patient outcomes.
Other Awards
Lillian Brown is an MD/PhD student at UNC who was awarded an F30 individual training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to support her graduate studies in epidemiology and the completion of her medical degree. Brown is spending 2009-2010 in Malawi completing her dissertation research on HIV partner notification. The study’s objective is to determine the best method for getting the sexual partners of patients who are diagnosed with HIV in our clinic to visit the clinic for HIV counseling and testing.
Meredith Gilliam is a medical student at UNC who was awarded an medical scholarship from the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). The award is given to U.S. medical students for clinical or research activities in pediatric or adult infectious diseases. Gilliam received the scholarship to travel to Nicaragua as part of the Collaborative Sahsa Health Initiative, a joint venture between UNC and the University of Nicaragua-Léon. CSHI is establishing a household surveillance system for monitoring health factors in the Sahsa region of northeast Nicaragua.
Suha Patel has been awarded a 2009 research training fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Patel, who is currently an MD student at UNC, will spend 2009-2010 in Kenya at the University of Nairobi working on a collaborative research project on HPV and cervical neoplasia among female sexual workers.
Joseph Tucker, MD, a graduate of the UNC School of Medicine and an infectious disease fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, received a $25,000 international travel fellowship from the Harvard Initiative for Global Health. The award will support a research project on integrating syphilis and HIV testing China, which has the world’s largest syphilis epidemic. Tucker’s research is being conducted under the mentorship of Myron Cohen, MD, director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases at UNC.
Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases contact: Lisa Chensvold, (919) 843-5719, lisa_chensvold@med.unc.edu.
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