SPH/MED Student Receives Schweitzer Fellowship
SPH/MED student Merredith Collins receives a first: a Lambaréné Public Health Fellowship.
Each year since 1979, the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship has chosen four senior medical students to work as Fellows at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, for three months. This year for the first time the organization has added Public Health Fellows, and its inaugural recipient is Boston University student Merredith Collins (SPH’08, MED’08).
As the 2007–2008 Lambaréné Public Health Fellow, Collins will spend five months at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon. She will work with the hospital’s Community Health Outreach program, which provides village-based health care. She also will create and implement a patient tracking system and evaluate HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis patient data, which she will summarize so the hospital can develop reliable clinical or public health programs.
Collins served as a 2005–2006 Boston Schweitzer Fellow, teaching Somali refugee women basic English skills and organizing focus groups to measure attitudes about, and knowledge of, tuberculosis.
One of the four medical school seniors selected for this year’s Lambaréné Fellowship is also a BU student, Kevin O’Connor (MED’07).
The fellowships are named for 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, who gave up careers in music and theology to work as a physician in Africa. Through support from the Gabonese government and various Schweitzer organizations, the hospital Schweitzer built is a modern medical facility, with two operating rooms, a dental clinic, and inpatient wards for pediatric, adult medicine, surgical, and obstetrical patients.
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.