The division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities established a Residency in Global Health three years ago. We agreed we would take two students the first year and... two Residents the first year because that's what we had resources for.
The two Residents whom we took were just extraordinary people. David Walton who was a medical student at Harvard had spent part time in two years helping to build the program in Haiti, taking care of patients there, training community health workers, and then came to the Brigham for his formal Residency training when he finished medical school, and now he's in the Global Health Residency program, and since that program offers a period of time in other countries for training, David chooses go to Haiti for his, his training. A marvellous young physician who will really contribute in major fashion to world health, without question.
The second resident, wonderful young woman named Nancy Lange who had been a dancer before she went to medical school, and who, while in medical school in New York, worked at length with prisoners, with people who had been convicted of substance abuse and who needed help from the outside, and Nancy was there to help them. Nancy is now, along with David, finishing the Residency in Global Health, but has been, as part of her work, looking at the problem of malaria in Rwanda.
The second year we took four Residents. We got some money from, for this, from my brother, to whom I referred earlier who's available for good causes whenever I've called on him, and this year, for the four slots we had 10 people apply. I went to a former student of mine, Michael Crichton, who provided us with the money to make it possible to make the program available to not 10 - we can't possibly do that - but we have five marvellous young people, including some with rather different kinds of interest.
Marcella Alsan, for example, is a young woman who graduated from Harvard College five, almost six years ago with a degree, with Honours in Economics and she had questions on the basis of her thesis work with some of the conclusions drawn by the World Bank with respect to the effects of illness on productivity on the part of people. And Marcy decided that, as part of her Global Health Residency she would include getting a PhD in economics. She applied to Harvard, Princeton and to MIT, was accepted almost at once into all three, and has chosen to take her PhD at Harvard in economics. She will complete the first two years of her Residency training, will take two years off then to do her course work in economics, and then return for her Residency, she's... to finish her Residency, but she's already begun to collect some of the data she's going to need from people in Lesotho who are not yet under treatment, but who - for AIDS - but who will be soon.
