Left to right: Marshall Lewis, Autumn Beavers, Kalah Ozimba, Rebecca Massey, D. Cameron Lee and Paul Chisolm Eight first-year medical students have been selected as recipients for the 2019 Medical Student Enrichment Program Scholarship. The chosen students will complete either the Social Medicine Elective at Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (DR) or the Chung Shan Medical University Hospital Elective in Taichung, Taiwan.
The DR group, which consists of six students, will live in and be a part of the free clinic medical staff that provides primary care, local vaccinations and medical education for better health and disease prevention to patients in the rural communities throughout Santo Domingo. Majd Zayzafoon, M.D., Ph.D., assistant dean for International Medical Education, and James Willig, M.D., MSPH, assistant dean for Clinical Education and alumnus of Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, visited the training location and host university to design the elective and arrange all logistics: transportation, housing, faculty support and clinic fees.
The Taiwan group, which consists of two students, will receive extensive clinical training in the high-tech therapeutic and diagnostic setting of Chung Shan Medical University Hospital (CSMU). They will live and work alongside Taiwanese medical students while learning how to relate empirical medicine to cultural practice as they observe the nuances of the delivery of Eastern medicine. Yu-Ying Chen, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UAB National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center and alumnus of CSMU, assisted in the development of the elective last year and helped interview the applicants this year.
Yilan Liu and Kevin LeeThe eight scholarship recipients are:
Autumn Beavers – Dominican Republic
Paul Chisolm – Dominican Republic
D. Cameron Lee – Dominican Republic
Marshall Lewis – Dominican Republic
Rebecca Massey – Dominican Republic
Kalah Ozimba – Dominican Republic
Kevin Lee – Taiwan
Yilan Liu – Taiwan
UAB International Medical Education’s mission is to advance education for medical students through global service learning. It serves that purpose by developing, coordinating and financially supporting educational clinical programs for UAB medical students who wish to participate in international clinical electives.
“We have chosen some of the School of Medicine’s most compassionate and accomplished students to represent us abroad,” said Zayzafoon. “Both locations will offer the students unique experiences to develop clinical skills and numerous opportunities to use newly learned cultural competencies to make a difference in very diverse parts of the globe. We wish them all the best of luck!”