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Evaline Cheng is a first-year medical student
at the UCSD's School of Medicine. This past summer, she
worked at the Instituto de Nutrición y Tecnología de los Alimentos
(INTA) in Santiago, Chile. She studied the risk factors for
cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in a cohort of healthy Chilean young
adults. In the past few decades, Chile has undergone rapid demographic and
nutritional changes, which has led to increases in obesity, cardiovascular
disease, and type 2 diabetes. This represents a public health and clinical
problem with a significant loss of healthy life years and concurrent economic
burden. The goal of her research is to understand more about the biological,
socioeconomic, and lifestyle factors that affect these non-communicable
diseases during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. She worked
under the guidance of Dr. Sheila Gahagan,
Professor of Pediatrics and Chief of Child Development and Community
Health at UCSD, and Dr. Raquel Burrows,
Professor of Endocrinology, at INTA, and the Global Health Academic Concentration at the School of
Medicine.
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Haley
Ciborowski, a
PhD student, completed her first year of the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in
Global Public Health. Haley comes from more than a decade of
experience working with indigenous and underserved populations in Central
America and East Africa, among others. Her research interests include social
determinants of health, access to primary care, and infectious disease
testing and treatment access for rural indigenous populations, marginalized
populations, people living in border and migration areas, and areas of
conflict. Thanks to the Global Health Institute Student Field
Experience award, Haley spent the summer in Guatemala collecting
preliminary data to inform possible dissertation questions, and worked with a
local research institute on migration and health. Research activities
included a household and individual survey of health outcomes, migration, and
social norms of more than 200 indigenous Mayans living in the western rural
highlands.
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Bianca
Devoto is a
third year undergraduate student, double majoring in Public
Health and Global Health. During
July 2016, she will be travelling to Ecuador to fulfill her Global Health Program Field
Experience. Bianca will be participating in the Child Family Health International
program, Community Medicine: From Rainforest to Coast. In this
program, she will be performing medical outreach in both urban and indigenous
communities in Ecuador, and plans to research the effects of chronic,
infectious, and vector-borne diseases in these differing community settings.
She will also research health care disparities between communities and how
access to medical care impacts community health outcomes.
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Sakiba
Khan, is completing
her medical degree here at UCSD's School of Medicine. She served as co-president
of the Global Health interest group at
UCSD School of Medicine for two years. While in medical school, Sakiba also
spent 6-weeks in Guatemala conducting ascariasis research for her medical
ISP. Most recently, with the GHI Student Field Experience travel
grant, Sakiba was able to spend six weeks in Spain in an intensive
Spanish-immersion program. She hopes that her knowledge in this language will
help her better connect with a predominately Hispanic patient population
at UCLA-Olive View, where Sakiba will continue her
residency training in internal medicine.
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Seungwan
Kim is a graduate student at the
School of Global Policy & Strategy at UCSD. Focusing on international
development, he is particularly interested in public health in developing
countries. During the summer, he participated as an intern in Project Malawi
from June to September--a research project focused on public health in
Malawi. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world with a poor
condition of medical and healthcare systems, and the number of professional
physicians and nurses is lacking compared to other African countries.
Furthermore, the “brain-drain” problem among medical professionals has
worsened. However, not much research has been conducted on this particular
problem. As a result from Seungwan's travel with the GHI Student Field
Experience funds, he developed an increased understanding of the public
health situation in Malawi and the underlying causes of "brain-drain"
issues among medical professionals.
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Lauren
Nippoldt is a
graduate student of Psychological and Medical Anthropology at UCSD. Her
research interests include Northern India, global health, psychological
experience, care, morality, and gender. Her summer field research was
conducted in Jaipur and Delhi, India where she was interested in the
psychological experiences of women in relation to health behaviors and
conceptions of well-being. More specifically, she sought to understand how
psychological, emotional, and moral experiences influence health and perceptions
of wellness. Lauren focused on the presence of care-giving in the lives of
women and how this influences their conceptions of well-being and self-care.
The GHI Student Field Experience award allowed her to conduct qualitative
ethnographic interviews for her master’s thesis and serve as an exploratory
study for developing her dissertation topic.
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Alexandra
(Zani) Roberts is
a UCSD Global Health Program undergraduate who returned to school at age 28
after a gap decade where she spent time traveling around the world and
discovering the importance of global public health. She traveled to Córdoba,
Argentina this past summer to work in Primary Care and Social Medicine with
Children Family Health International (CFHI) as field experience to use for
her senior capstone thesis.
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Kazi Priyanka Silmi is a PhD Student at UCSD/SDSU
Joint Doctoral Program in Global Health. Her research interest lies in sexual
and reproductive health, use of technology for health interventions,
gender-based violence, and health communication. She is currently working as
a Research Assistant in a study on enhanced linkage to HIV care following
home-based testing in rural Uganda (PI: Dr. Susan Kiene). With support of the
GHI Student Field Experience Travel grant, Priyanka conducted preliminary
research to inform her dissertation research on sexual violence, mental
health and access to reproductive healthcare of young, unmarried women in
Bangladesh. She is specifically interested in the female university student
and female garment worker population, and utilized this travel to identify
potential community partners and subject recruitment methods. She hopes that
through her dissertation, she will be able to shed light in the gap in the
existing academic literature that has focused solely on married women's
experience of gender-based violence and reproductive healthcare access in
Bangladesh.
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