Three UCSF Students Win Overseas Training Fellowships

The Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have announced that three UCSF students are among the 2005 awardees of the FIC/Ellison Overseas Fellowships in Global Health and Clinical Research Program, a training program for U.S. low- and middle-income students in the health sciences. The three UCSF winners are Alon Unger, Kyle Luman and Charles Lin. Unger, a School of Medicine student, will work in Bahia, Brazil under the mentorship of Drs. Warren Johnson, Cornell Medical School, and Mitermayer Galvão dos Reis, Federal University of Bahia. His project will involve tropical disease research. Luiz Henrique Santos Guimarães will be the Brazilian Fogarty/Ellison Fellow. Luman, a MD/MPH candidate, will work in Kampala, Uganda under the mentorship of Drs. Chris Whalen of Case Western Reserve University, and Moses Kamya, Makerere University. He will work on HIV/TB research. Elizabeth Namukwaya, resident in internal medicine at Makerere University, Mulago School of Medicine, will be the Ugandan Fogarty/Ellison Fellow. Lin, a School of Medicine student, will work in Wanjing, China under the mentorship of Dr. Myron Cohen, University of North Carolina and Dr. Xiang-Sheng Chen, Chinese National Center for STD and Leprosy Control. His clinical research training will focus on HIV/AIDS and syphilis surveillance. Xing Gao, MD., will be the Zambian Fogarty/Ellison Fellow. FIC selects top notch medical, dental, and public health graduate students from the United States and from the poor countries. These paired student awardees receive one year of mentored clinical research training at an NIH-funded institution in a developing country. (The successful applicants are listed at the end of the release.) The students will obtain a significant experience with clinical research and will work together. "Increasing the numbers of clinical researchers with practical experience in research-poor settings will enhance our ability to tackle global health challenges," said Sharon H. Hrynkow, Ph.D., FIC Acting Director, on behalf of FIC and its partners. "Projects on AIDS and related opportunistic infections, malaria, sexually transmitted infections and non-infectious disease, issues such as reproductive health, provide new insights for tomorrow's clinical leaders, both in the United States and in low- and middle-income nations." The FIC, the Ellison Medical Foundation, and sister NIH National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases jointly support the fellowship program. The Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of Schools of Public Health provide program support for recruitment, review, and matching. In the program, U.S. students are paired with host country students, creating partnerships and contributing to an international community of research scholars. Twenty-seven fellows were selected from 22 U.S. medical schools and five U.S. schools of public health from a pool of 120 highly-qualified U.S. applicants in the second annual competition. Eleven fellows are pursuing dual degree programs (MD-MPH or MD-PhD). The foreign sites identified 27 foreign fellows at similar points in their careers. "The first year of this fellowship program was very gratifying. The collaborations among the U.S. and foreign site fellows were active and valuable. The researcher leaders were able to actively carve out parts of on-going research for the fellows, thereby making the experience intense as well as exciting and rewarding," said Aron Primack, M.D., FIC program officer. Additional information about the Fogarty International Center can be found on the FIC website.