Ashley Wade

Originally from South Carolina, Ashley is now a second-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Her interest in global health began in high school with a nonprofit that she co-founded with two friends based in New Delhi, India, which sponsors surgeries and medical care for patients who are unable to afford care. In college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she expanded her understanding of global health systems with a major in Global Health, a minor in Medical Spanish and a senior honors thesis on healthcare access for human trafficking survivors in the United Kingdom. For two years after graduating, she worked remotely as an English teacher and lived in Latin America, East Africa and Southeast Asia. In medical school, Ashley volunteers at the student-run, physician-supervised free clinic as a Spanish interpreter and junior clinician in the longitudinal primary care program, and she has started a program connecting refugees at the Libertas Center for Human Rights to medical students for English conversation practice. In medical school, her interest in tropical medicine and infectious disease has only grown, and she is excited to continue pursuing these fields in her career in medicine. 

Evaluating Focal Mass Drug Administration (fMDA) as a Novel Strategy to Prevent Malaria in Pregnancy in Rural Uganda
Bugoye Level III Health Center (BHC), in collaboration with Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)
Kasese District, Uganda

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
The Kean Fellowship gave me the incredible opportunity to experience how academic global health research is conducted on the ground. The research itself taught me about study design, creativity in solving study implementation challenges, the importance of community involvement and the unique challenges associated with malaria. However, in addition to the research itself, there was so much learning that happened from being immersed in the research environment and witnessing how the local team navigated cross-cultural and cross-time zone communications, problem-solving, and their roles as researchers from a community conducting research in that community. Understanding these processes, along with the transformative experience of the research itself, was such a powerful learning opportunity.  

What do you anticipate learning?
As part of the Kean Fellowship, I will continue to collaborate with my research colleagues and mentors in Uganda and at my home institution to see our research project through to completion. The learning that began during my time in Uganda has sparked my research career in infectious disease, and I look forward to sustaining these research partnerships throughout my time in medical school and beyond. I also hope to continue understanding the nuances of cross-cultural research and teamwork. Lastly, I am excited to disseminate our research findings to the local community members, physicians, government personnel and researchers, and gain experience in research communication across countries and cultures. 

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
What draws me to tropical medicine is the combination of the scientific complexity inherent to the diseases with the fundamental need for global teamwork and collaboration to address them. Tropical medicine cannot be separated from global systems of inequality, and many of the challenges that we face globally, such as climate change, are disproportionately affecting areas where tropical medicine is crucial. The monumental task of addressing this inequality requires creativity, cultural humility, leadership, and scientific innovation, and this unique combination makes it an exciting and impactful field in which to pursue a career.