Lisa Wanda
Lisa is a second-year medical student at UNC School of Medicine. She was born in Liberia during the Liberian Civil war and migrated to Sierra Leone and then to Nigeria after the war spilled into Sierra Leone. At age 12, she immigrated to Minnesota, where she completed middle school and high school. Lisa was interested in medicine from a young age after witnessing the direct impact of war and diseases on the body. Her interest in global and public health came later, after understanding the interplay of structural/systemic forces, social and cultural beliefs and diseases in shaping our health outcomes. She attended Duke University and graduated with a B.S in Biology and a B.A. in Global Health. During her last year of undergraduate studies, Ebola devastated two of the three countries she lived in, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and also threatened to spread to Nigeria. She ended that year strongly believing that research, when done in a culturally sensitive manner, is one of the best tools against emerging diseases. Lisa decided to incorporate infectious disease research into her career and spent a year working on antibiotic-resistant infectious disease research at Duke University. Her goal is to be able to work alongside many who focus on preventing morbidity and mortality, especially from diseases with known causes, treatment and prevention methods. In her free time, she enjoys running/hiking, working on DIY projects/crafts, and travelling with family and friends.
Project: "Option B+: ART Safety and Durability during First and Subsequent Pregnancies"
6/04/2018 - 7/27/2018
Malawi
What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
It has been a great honor to be selected as a recipient of the Ben Kean Fellowship. I am wholeheartedly grateful for the opportunity the fellowship has made and the doors it has opened on my path to working in infectious disease in Africa. It is a whole different and fulfilling experience to go back to my home continent and work on a project that has the potential to improve the well-being of communities. More importantly, it has been a great growing opportunity to work alongside and learn from the community I have met in Malawi and to gain more understanding of the complexity in working in a community different than mine. The value in gaining a new perspective on what health and diseases mean within Malawian’s culture and political environment is innumerable. I am more determined than ever to pursue my career in tropical medicine and I can truly say that the Ben Kean Fellowship and my Malawian community has set me on the path to making that dream become a reality.
What do you anticipate learning?
The diversity within the continent of Africa and within each country in Africa makes it difficult to translate my experience living in West Africa to that of living in East Africa. One of the greatest learning opportunities will be to understand the special considerations involved in conducting international research and in providing healthcare services in Lilongwe, Malawi. I hope to learn immensely about and from the community in which I will be living and working. As part of my project in looking at anthropometric indicators of nutritional status of infants born to HIV-infected mothers who were taking ART while pregnant, I am looking forward to deepening my knowledge of the impact of infectious disease on child health and nutrition in low-resource settings. In the process of the project, I also anticipate improving my data analysis skills by gaining experience in data analysis software, statistical methods and epidemiology. Additionally, I hope to better my ability to coherently and effectively disseminate research findings through report writing, presentations and implementation.
What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
What ignited my interest in tropical medicine was witnessing and experience the debilitating and often deadly impact of diseases like malaria, diarrhea, dengue fever and HIV. What keeps me even more interested is knowing that many of these diseases are preventable, treatable or manageable. Finding the best method in creating accessible and affordable health information and treatment within a particular community can lead to a substantial decrease in morbidity that benefits all sectors of society. It is an investment that makes sense to me. I plan to harness the power of preventive medicine and to increase access to medical treatment and research as I continue my calling of helping many who live in tropical countries like Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone attain health and satisfactory well-being.