Global Health Scholars Track Offers Unique Experiences

By Dirk Hoffman

The four-year program will select four first-year medical students each fall to participate in the track which combines innovative curriculum, real-world experience, scholarly projects and mentorship to train future global health leaders.

The program was initiated in 2022 by medical students Joseph Iskander and Rhea Marfatia.

“We wanted to add something to complement how global health is addressed at UB,” Iskander says.

Iskander says the major distinction between GHST and what has already been done in global health at UB is the main focus is not on clinical work.

“Our goal is to focus on public health work and sustainability efforts — identifying a problem, and trying to address it alongside community health care workers and stakeholders,” he says.

Marfatia says she and Iskander were both on UB’s Global Health Interest Group’s executive board during their first two years of medical school.

“Afterwards, we brainstormed this idea to create a global health track for students who are interested in a more longitudinal, ethical promotion of global health,” she says.

They worked with faculty members and administrators David A. Milling, MD, executive director of the Office of Medical Education and senior associate dean for medical education; and Alan J. Lesse, MD, associate director of medical curriculum, to fully flesh out the concept of the track.

The GHST team has been working with David M. Holmes, MD, director of global medical education and director of the Global Medicine Program, and Anthony Burdo, MD, through the Department of Family Medicine, which sponsors trips abroad to provide clinical medicine to low-resource communities. This year, the program has trips going to Panama, Peru, Ghana, and possibly South Africa.

“Those trips are great exposure opportunities for students because it gives them a chance to do some clinical work and see how health care is delivered in low-resource settings,” Iskander says. “However, there has not been as much done amongst our students in terms of public health work and sustainability efforts. That is really where the inspiration for the Global Health Scholars Track came from.”

“The way we envision global health advancing is through empowerment trips, where we engage in continuing medical education and bidirectional learning with community members,” Marfatia says. “We assist in improving their existing infrastructure, empowering the community members, providing them with additional resources they may need which makes it much more sustainable in the long run.”

“We are working alongside these communities, based on their terms and needs, ensuring they can sustain their own health care system after we leave.”

During the first two years of the GHST, the medical students will attend workshops, seminars and lecture series to learn the basics of global health and how to create a sustainable partnership with a community.

“We want to make sure our students learn how to ethically and responsibly engage with these communities experiencing health care disparities, particularly in the global setting,” Iskander says.

The other portion of the program involves partnering with Jericho Road Community Health Center and connecting students with Jericho Road’s clinics abroad in Sierra Leone and Nepal, as well as its clinics in Buffalo.

Founded in 1997, Jericho Road is a culturally sensitive community health center, especially for refugee and low-income community members, facilitating wellness and self-sufficiency by addressing health, education, economic and spiritual barriers.

Burdo, a family physician at Jericho Road and a Jacobs School volunteer faculty member, will be the GHST adviser, overseeing educational sessions and project planning.

Paul Violanti, DNP, is the director of global education at Jericho Road and liaison with Jericho’s global clinics.

“The goal is for the students to come up with a sustainability project, whether it be a public health project, a needs assessment or a research project, at one of the clinics,” Iskander says.

Collaboration with the existing resident physician global health program will also be a feature of the new track.

“Dr. Holmes has been a great help to us in designing the program,” Iskander says. “Our plan is to connect our students with the global health scholar residents in family medicine so that they can be mentors to the students and also participate in and help with the students’ projects.”

During their third and fourth year, the global health scholars will have the opportunity to implement their projects and work on the ground with the community members in the low-resource areas.

At the end of their fourth year, they will be expected to present their project to the rest of the GHST members and a panel of faculty advisers.

“Something we really want to emphasize is that global health can happen right here in Buffalo. We have a very big immigrant and refugee population that could very well be the center of a project,” Marfatia says.

Iskander says the track conducted a “soft open” last year with its first cohort of students — Kaswana Phiri, Emily Bai, Supriya Prasad Pandit and Allison Thayer — ­“who have been helping us finalize the details and have been a great help in solidifying the curriculum for the track.”

Phiri spent the first 10 years of his life growing up in Zambia, noting that he experienced firsthand the lack of resources there.

“Just having those experiences with my family and my friends, losing a lot of people to preventable illnesses and preventable causes, really changed my view on a lot of things and really drew me toward medicine,” he says.

“I knew that global health is something I need to do before I leave this earth. It is something that will help fulfill my life and give back to people who are experiencing similar challenges as I did growing up,” Phiri adds.

He recalls hearing a story about missionary workers in one of the South African countries deciding they wanted to plant tomatoes for the community, but they never asked the community members if they wanted tomatoes.

The missionary workers then noticed as the tomatoes started to grow, they would go missing overnight.

They asked the community why the tomatoes went missing and were told that the hippopotamuses eat everything that is planted.

“The conclusion was if they had talked to the community and figured out what it really needed, they would have known that planting tomatoes wouldn’t work,” Phiri says.

“The Global Health Scholars Track gives us the opportunity to first engage and assess what a community truly needs before offering a helping hand,” he adds. “I want to try and make a difference in ways that the community needs and in ways it feels are important.”

Pandit says she was exposed to global and public health through a philosophy class as an undergraduate student at Cornell University and became a global health minor, but that her most pivotal experience occurred after college when she lived in New Delhi and worked in Rajasthan, India, under a Fulbright U.S. Student Research grant.

“Working on a project in rural India was challenging, but deeply fulfilling for me. In confirming I want to spend some part of my professional life there in the future, I also recognized how difficult it is to find an experience like this, especially as a medical student,” she says.

“I’m hopeful that the Global Health Scholars Track will motivate and introduce students to a framework that makes international work a more feasible, concrete goal during medical school.”

After graduating from Amherst College with a degree in sociocultural anthropology, Bai worked in the federal health care space as a design researcher before deciding to pursue clinical medicine.

“I was excited to join the Global Health Scholars Track because I felt after several years of working, I feel much better equipped to contribute to the field,” she says. “After learning about the minefield of unintended consequences in global health that often causes more harm than good, I was hoping the GHST would show me positive examples of well thought-out global health partnerships to drive more ethical action.”

More broadly, Bai thinks that an education in global health holds valuable lessons for the practice of medicine.

She is interested in cultivating experience for treating complex chronic ailments that impact multiple body systems, susceptible to social circumstances (chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis, dysautonomia, long COVID, substance use, etc.)

“I think any exposure to cross cultural contexts and individuals with different life worlds will enhance my ability to communicate with patients and grow my intuition for the universality of healing,” Bai says. “I’m hopeful this experience can help me develop a reflex to continually reassess my approach to treatment and diagnosis, so that the mental models I establish are more nuanced, critical and comprehensive.”

Thayer says her interest in global health began when she was an undergraduate student at Vassar College studying history throughout her Hispanic studies major.

“I always knew I wanted to pursue a career in medicine, but I have also always been interested in how historical events inform today’s world and systems,” she says.

“In an increasingly globalized world, most doctors will be involved in global medicine at some point in their careers,” Thayer adds. “If we hope to serve the world, it is essential that we strive to understand the world. The Global Health Scholars Track is an opportunity to do just that.”

The Global Health Scholars Track will host an introductory general interest meeting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 28 in a teleconference on Zoom.

For more information or to register for the meeting, send an email to: ubglobalhealthscholarstrack@gmail.com