A summer of personal and professional growth awaits four Indiana University School of Medicine students selected as Slemenda Scholars by the IU Center for Global Health Equity. Rising second-year students Madeline Cory, Om Dalal, Bethlehem Daniel and Ryan McArdle will travel to Eldoret, Kenya, to learn about every facet of the AMPATH partnership and complete a project with an IU faculty mentor.
AMPATH, the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, is a partnership between academic health centers to deliver health care, train the next generation of health care providers and conduct research to improve lives around the world. IU School of Medicine physicians began the partnership with Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) and Moi University School of Medicine in 1988. IU leads the AMPATH consortium of 15 universities around the world and has had full-time faculty in Kenya for more than 30 years. The partnership now also includes sites in Ghana, Mexico and Nepal.
“These students have this tremendous opportunity early in their education to see the model of equitable global health partnership that IU helps to lead,” said Debra Litzelman, MA, MD, MACP, director of education for the IU Center for Global Health Equity which coordinates the Slemenda Scholars program. “This experience will lay the foundation for a future medical career that prioritizes care for people in underserved communities both around the world and in Indiana,” she continued.
Each of the selected students was led to the experience through a personal history or interest in tackling existing healthcare inequities.
Cory volunteers at Beacon Community Center, an organization that supports individuals who are unhoused in the Bloomington community. “I recognized how those who are unhoused experience numerous limitations to receiving proper health care. I am interested in gaining more experience with vulnerable populations to better understand how to increase availability, accessibility and acceptability to health care. I have been able apply my public health background to working with resource-limited populations within the United States, I am eager to expand my global health knowledge by working with populations in different countries,” said Cory, a Valparaiso native who received her undergraduate degrees in biology and neuroscience from IU Bloomington and now attends medical school on the same campus.
“I appreciate that AMPATH focuses on creating healthcare programs based on the needs of the community by working alongside patients and healthcare providers within the community. I believe that successful healthcare programs result from collaboration in the form of sharing knowledge, new ideas and empowering one another,” she continued.
Dalal is part of the Rural Health Track at the IU School of Medicine campus in Terre Haute and was president of the Timmy Global Health organization for two years while an undergraduate at Indiana State University earning a degree in biology. “My interest in global health stems from my background as an immigrant as well as my experiences working with the Timmy Global Health organization. I come from a family of farmers in rural India and every time I visit my extended family, I am taken aback by the disparity in healthcare between what they have access to and what I have access to in the United States. As such, my initial motivation to pursue medicine at the global level began with the goal of reducing the gap in healthcare disparities,” said Dalal.
“The barriers that patients face in rural America are not so different from those seen in other underserved areas around the world,” he continued. “The Slemenda Scholars program would serve as an optimal intersection between my interest in global health and my passion for working in underserved areas like rural America.”
The Slemenda Scholars program began in 1998 and honors late IU faculty member Charles Slemenda, DrPH, who had a passion for international medical education. Dr. Slemenda spent three years in Lesotho working as a public health worker after completing his MPH in health services administration. The award in his name helps pay for travel, room and board and a small stipend for the students to participate in the partnership. The Dr. Talmage Bosin International Study Fund, the Brater Family Scholarship and the IU School of Medicine-Terre Haute join the IU Center for Global Health Equity this year in providing funds to support this unique learning experience.
“My worldview, from a very young age, has been greatly influenced by my identity as the daughter of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants. As an aspiring physician with interdisciplinary interests in global health, research, and science communication, I am confident that the opportunities afforded to me by this experience will facilitate my growth,” said Daniel, an IU School of Medicine Indianapolis student from Carmel, Indiana. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she triple majored in neuroscience, medicine, health, and society, and communication of science and technology, Daniel also engaged in both local and international service as a co-president of her school’s Timmy Global Health chapter. At IU, she serves as the community service chair for the Student National Medical Association.
“Growing up, I would go to school and be immersed in American culture, and come home to traditional foods and talks about ongoing events back home. This dichotomy made me naturally curious about the world around me. As I got older and became more cognizant of the inequities that existed throughout the world, I vowed to serve as an advocate for change,” recalls Daniel. “The prospect of learning directly from healthcare workers and community members in Eldoret is of great interest to me. As I continually grow as a student of global and public health, learning more about the lived experiences of Kenyans will be a defining experience, and hopefully an opportunity for me to connect with them as well.”
McArdle, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame who is a student on the IU School of Medicine’s Indianapolis campus, has worked with people from underserved communities during a research experience in Bangladesh as well as a patient navigator at the IU Student Outreach Clinic. “I am committed to a career spent working to improve the health of the most vulnerable globally,” said McArdle. “I very strongly believe that the opportunity to work with AMPATH-one of the few truly special success stories in the oftentimes flawed and messy field of global health-would not only expose me to global oncology research but also show me how to forge meaningful, lasting, and mutually beneficial relationships with colleagues in Kenya. In short, I hope to learn how to do global health the right way.”
“As a young white man who had spent most of his life in rural Indiana, my experience in Bangladesh was, quite frankly, challenging,” he recalls. “I was by myself, traveling abroad for the first time, living in a city of 20 million people who spoke a different language, scrambling to piece together a new project after our original plan had crumbled due to forces beyond our control. However, that experience did not scare me away from the field of global health. I met some incredible people and forged some great and lasting friendships, and I hope to carry the lessons I learned—what I did well, and what I could have done better—into my time in Kenya.”
Over the past 30 years, more than 1,100 Indiana University medical trainees have visited the AMPATH partnership in Kenya and more than 400 Kenyan trainees have learned alongside their peers in North America. An educational endowment to fund exchange opportunities for Kenyan and IU medical students has been established to honor the years of service and global impact of Bob and Lea Anne Einterz.
Other unique global health opportunities at IU include a Global Health Residency Pathway available to medical residents in a variety of disciplines, quarterly Global Health Research Speaker Series and Global Health Scholars Day.
