Student Field Experience

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.