Seven Medical Students Earn WNY Prosperity Fellow Status

By Dirk Hoffman

Supported by The Prentice Family Foundation, the fellowship program is for college and graduate students with an entrepreneurial drive who want to make a difference in Western New York.

It assists undergraduate and graduate students at the University at Buffalo and Canisius University who are actively preparing for careers that further economic development and growth in the Western New York area.

The program combines financial assistance, in the form of scholarships, with paid, credit-bearing internships to assist fellows in acquiring both academic and practical experiences in their intended professions. Fellows are given the opportunity to intern in their chosen fields of interest, where they work alongside and are mentored by leaders in upper-level management.

This year’s class includes the following Jacobs School students: Parveen Attai, Bryan Carvajal, Temara Cross, Arthur Germakovski, Ogechi Ogoke, Guled Sharif and Ethan Tong.

Tong, a rising second-year medical student, is from Amherst, New York, and outside of medicine he is the owner of Beyond Boba, a mobile boba tea business serving the Western New York Community. He also grew up working at his family’s restaurant, Eastern Pearl, where he continues to help out.

Tong is interested in UB’s MD/MBA dual degree program and his long-term goal is to become a physician leader who serves Western New York and helps address gaps in care such as education inequity.

“I am interested in combining clinical medicine, entrepreneurship, and technology in my future career,” he says. “I hope to eventually open my own practice in my hometown of Amherst and create a space that provides high-quality care while remaining connected to underserved communities.”

During his first year of medical school, Tong was involved in several community outreach and mentorship activities.

He served as the undergraduate student coordinator for Medical Student Office Hours, a student-run initiative where medical students mentor and support undergraduate pre-medical students.

“This work has been especially meaningful to me because many of the students we support are first-generation college students or first-generation premedical students, which reflects my own background and experiences,” Tong says. “I understand how important mentorship, guidance, and encouragement can be for students who are navigating the path to medicine without many examples around them.”

He also volunteers with Compeer of Greater Buffalo, where he serves as a youth mentor and builds supportive relationships with a youth in the community.

Tong says he sees the fellowship providing an opportunity to grow as both a future physician and community-minded leader.

“I hope to learn from mentors, build relationships across different fields, and better understand how health care, business, and community development intersect,” he says. The fellowship has already provided me numerous opportunities and experiences to interact with local business leaders that I otherwise would have never had the opportunity to connect with. Speaking with and listening to others who have walked the same path has further motivated me to pursue my goals.”

Sharif, also a rising second-year medical student, is a Buffalo native and first-generation college student.

“Buffalo has always been home for me, so a lot of my academic and career goals are rooted in serving this community and helping expand opportunities here in Western New York,” he notes.

“A lot of my outreach grows out of the leadership roles I hold at the Jacobs School — as president of the Frank Hastings Hamilton Surgical Society, I work with faculty and surgical mentors to run hands-on skills workshops, specialty panels, and mentorship events that give students early exposure to surgery,” Sharif says.

“That same focus on opening doors carries into my role as vice president of the Jonathan Daniels Chapter of Black Men in White Coats, where the work is centered on mentorship and representation for Black and underrepresented men pursuing medicine.”

Like his classmate Tong, Sharif is interested in pursuing the MD/MBA dual degree path.

“My interest in the MD/MBA comes from a simple realization: meaningful, lasting change in health care almost never comes from a single physician or a single executive. It comes from the intersection of sectors,” Sharif says.

“Clinical excellence alone can't expand access, and business leadership alone can't safeguard purpose, but together they build systems that strengthen entire communities.”

Sharif says he grew up on Buffalo’s West Side as the son of Somali immigrants, “in a community rich in resilience but too often constrained by limited access to health care, mentorship, and economic opportunity.”

“Watching my mother work as a translator and doula at Jericho Road Community Health Center, I learned early that health care is more than clinical encounters. It’s workforce development, economic stability, and social service all at once,” he says.

“The MBA gives me the tools to act on that understanding, which is why I've already started building toward it as president of the UB Biotech Innovation and Investment Group,” Sharif adds. “I want to understand commercialization, intellectual property, and capital formation so I can help cultivate physician innovators who don't just practice in Western New York but launch companies, create jobs, and attract investment here.”

“The economic future of this region is inseparable from the health of its people, and I want to be able to work fluently in both languages, the clinical and the financial, to help close those gaps.”

Sharif’s long-term goal is to open a robotic surgery clinic in Buffalo, and it’s rooted in a real problem: there are significant geographic discrepancies in access to care across Western New York. Patients in outlying and underserved parts of the region often have to travel for advanced surgical care that should be available closer to home, he says.

“I see the future of addressing that in ambulatory surgery centers, where advances in laparoscopy and minimally invasive robotic technology increasingly allow complex procedures to be done safely on an outpatient basis, at lower cost and closer to the communities that need them. That's where I want to build.”

Sharif says the Prosperity Fellowship “has connected me with business and health care leaders across Buffalo in ways I simply wouldn't have had access to otherwise.”

“Being able to bring that caliber of leadership directly to my fellow students, and to start building the kind of education that turns ideas into companies, is exactly the bridge between medicine and economic development that I came into this work hoping to be a part of,” he adds.

Startup and Innovation CoLab, powered by Blackstone LaunchPad, a hub for entrepreneurship, oversees the WNY Prosperity Fellowship Program for UB students.