Students Garner Fellowships for International Health Studies
The medical school has awarded International Health Fellowships to four fourth-year medical students that will allow them to spend one to three months studying medicine and health care in other countries. Stacey L. Chamberlain of Crystal Lake, Illinois, will be traveling to Katete, Zambia, for an eight-week clinical clerkship at St. Francis Hospital, where she will become an integral part of the health care team. The 365-bed hospital serves a population of 163,000 and is a referral center for another 1.2 million, especially for surgery and more complex medical cases. Chamberlain was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and an English teacher in Thailand before entering medical school.
Beijing, China, is the destination for Craig Hales, of Salisbury, Maryland. He was accepted to a United Nations AIDS program internship and will be using his fellowship award to support his participation in the unpaid position. Previously he had received a scholarship for a year of advanced Mandarin studies at Tshinghua University in Beijing. During that year, through interactions with Chinese and Western health care workers, he was struck by how little people knew about HIV and AIDS in China, including its prevalence in the country.
Julie D. Lamb of Issaquah, Washington, is heading to Dar es Salaam, Mauritania, West Africa, to assist in developing a one-room hut medical clinic. Working with a local physician who visits village clinics weekly, she hopes to train volunteers in basic first aid, disease prevention, and vaccination procedures. A volunteer in Haiti with the World Health Organization as an undergraduate, Lamb also hopes to bring plumbing and running water to the clinic.
Phoenix, Arizona, native Parminder S. Suchdev will be traveling to Havana, Cuba, for a public health elective offered jointly by the nonprofit Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba and Cuba’s National School in Public Health. Suchdev, also a master’s in public health degree student, was involved in a public health study in the Dominican Republic as an undergraduate and has participated in two week-long medical missions to Nicaragua with the Northwestern University Alliance for International Development.
Additional fellowships will be awarded in the spring to four first-year students, who will complete their activities during the summer
