Announcing 2022 Summer Travel Grants

The Center for Global Health is pleased to announce the seven recipients for our latest global health travel grant awards. These grants support students, trainees, and faculty mentors leading groups of students to low-and middle-income countries for education, research, or service-learning programs. Below find more information about the recipients and their respective projects.

Global Health Faculty Mentor Travel Grants

Project: Palliative Care Training in Low-Income Countries
Eldoret, Kenya

This program, in collaboration with Living Room International, will demonstrate to students and trainees the challenges of initiating and delivering palliative care in underserved countries while searching for opportunities for improvement by collaborating with an existing in-country palliative care program. MUSC faculty will lead and mentor a multidisciplinary group of MUSC fellows, residents, and medical and nursing students to Eldoret, Kenya, where they will shadow the local clinical team at the palliative care unit, hospice, home visits, and university hospital.

                               
   Patrick Coyne, MSN     Leigh Meade Vaughan, M.D.       Lauren Mims, D.O.    
   College of Medicine             College of Medicine             College of Medicine  

Student and Trainee Global Health Travel Grants 

Nancy Hagood, M.D.
Resident, Pediatrics and Internal Medicine
Project: Pediatric Rotation at Arusha Lutheran Medical Centre (Tanzania)

Nancy Hagood, M.D. will travel to Arusha, Tanzania as part of the Pediatric Global Health Residency Track for a four-week rotation working alongside local clinicians at Arusha Lutheran Medical Centre and Selian Lutheran Hospital in Tanzania. She will work in both inpatient settings, and have teaching opportunities through conferences and daily ward rounds.

“My decision to pursue a combined residency program in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics was motivated primarily by my passion for global health and my desire to be able to provide medical care for all ages in a variety of settings. Looking to the future, I hope that global health will be an integral part of my long-term career. I hope to continue working in developing countries around the world to partner with and build up local leaders who will help transform communities. Specifically, I desire to partner with local physicians to build sustainable healthcare systems to provide care to the most marginalized populations.

I am grateful for the many opportunities provided at MUSC and am eager to participate in a month-long international rotation to continue to learn about global health and how best to support and develop sustainable health systems."

Rebeca Hansen, M.D.
Resident, Radiology
Project: Global Health Elective at Masindi Kitara Medical Center (Uganda)

The primary goal of radiology resident Rebeca Hansen's global health elective at Masindi Kitara Medical Center (MKMC) will be to work with Ugandan physicians and clinicians to improve diagnostic imaging interpretation in order to establish a diagnosis and guide management.

"A large contributor to my attraction to MUSC Radiology Residency Program was the unique collaboration with One World Health/(MKMC) and the global health elective offered to PGY-5 radiology residents. I have been looking forward to this elective since starting residency. One of the most meaningful experiences that drove me to pursue a career in medicine was a medical outreach trip that I took to Guatemala as a college student. On that short two-week trip, I had my first introduction to medical care in an underdeveloped community, with an emphasis on understanding sustainable medical projects and the global impact of public health efforts.

I am interested in furthering my understanding of unique pathologies which are not commonly seen in the United States. I look forward to the challenge of optimizing the use of sonographic and radiographic images to provide high-quality, cost-effective medical care in a low-resource environment.

Ritchy Hodebourg, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Neuroscience
Project: The Translational School on Addiction Neuroscience (Morocco)

Postdoctoral fellow Ritchy Hodeboug, Ph.D., will facilitate a course in Rabat, Morocco as part of a workshop hosted by Univesite Mohammed V to train clinical students, fellows, and early career faculty from Africa on the basis of the neuroscience of drug addiction. He will travel to Rabat a month in advance to train the host institution's technicians in the surgical techniques for making intracranial injections into rats of a virus that contains a transgene. This will allow students in the course to conduct experiments providing insight into how the dopamine pathways in the brain function to control reward behavior.

"Growing up in Martinique, an African-descendant island devastated by crack and cannabis addiction, I vowed to understand substance use disorders (SUDs) in order to help vulnerable people, especially those in low- and middle-income countries like Martinique. In order to gain international experience, I started my career in research in France, where I did a master’s degree in Neuroscience. My international experience will be an asset in Morocco because I will be able to teach rodent surgeries in English and French, the most used language in this country after Arabic. This opportunity will improve my teaching skills and help African neuroscientists in their research by using cutting-edge techniques. Moreover, as an Afro-descendant person it will be an honor to help the African continent fight SUDs, and build a sustainable foundation for African neuroscience."

Brittany Kuhn, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Neuroscience
Project: Surgical Training for Advancements in Neuroscience Research (Morocco)

Brittany Kuhn, Ph.D. will travel to Rabat, Morocco this fall where the Université Mohammed V will be hosting a two-week course “The Translational School on Addiction Neuroscience”. The objective of this course is to engage the African community of emerging neuroscientists at various career stages and conduct a variety of teaching laboratories to enhance the intellectual and technical expertise of these students. One such laboratory that Dr. Kuhn will lead focuses on the role of dopamine in reward processing behaviors. Prior to the course, she will spend a few weeks conducting the surgeries necessary for the success of the laboratory exercise, while also helping to train technicians to proficiently and independently perform these surgeries in the future.

"Personal and professional connections from different universities across the world lead to more opportunities for collaboration, discussion of scientific results, and technological troubleshooting. I have directly experienced the benefits of expanding upon my professional network, as one of my main projects is a multisite collaborative effort between our lab and three others in the United States, as well as a lab in Italy and Northern Ireland. I owe a great deal of my scientific development to discussions from this project and am always enthused to continue to build my scientific network.

Importantly, I will be further challenged to think about my own research with a new perspective which will invigorate me to ask new and innovative questions. To progress as a global scientific community, it is vital that scientific discoveries be accessible to individuals across the globe, not just localized in countries with funding for biomedical universities."

Learn about MUSC Center for Global Health funding opportunities.