2009 Medical Humanities Scholars
Nitin Ahuja
Nitin is a third-year medical student at the University of Michigan. He grew up in Central New Jersey and graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a major in Biology and a minor in English. Some of his current humanistic diversions include an historical research project on hospital design and a small black journal that he keeps in his white coat. Last year he served as co-president of his AMSA chapter.
Nitin is excited to be a part of the Medical Humanities Scholars Program and to learn more about how narrative methods can inform and strengthen clinical practice. He hopes that engagement with the humanities will play an ample role in his professional life.
Andrea Wershof Schwartz
Andrea is a 4th year medical student at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she entered through the Humanities and Medicine early admissions program. Andrea is a member of AOA, was selected as a fellow in the Gold Humanism Honor Society, and was awarded the Livia Blum Fellowship to pursue an MPH at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008-2009. Andrea served as editor of The Mount Sinai Mosaic, a student literary publication, and her poetry and writing has won numerous awards, including first places nationally in the William Carlos William Poetry Competition and The Major C.W. Offutt VA Humanism in Medicine Essay Award, and an honorable mention in the Humanism in Medicine Essay Contest of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation. Her work has been published in The Journal of Medical Humanities, The New Physician, The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine and The Legible Script. As a college student at the dual degree program of Columbia University and The Jewish Theological seminary, Andrea earned degrees in History and Bible; her background in text study has shaped her approach to becoming a better listener to patients’ stories. She is interested in the impact of studying the humanities on medical education, as well as the intersection of medicine and religion from ethical, narrative and historical perspectives, and plans to specialize in geriatrics. Andrea lives in New York with her husband Charlie Schwartz.
Syeda Hasan
Syeda is currently a third-year medical student at New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. She went straight from High School into a 7 year combined B.S. /D.O program, where she received her Bachelors in 2007, and anticipates her medical degree in May 2010. She was born in Bangladesh, immigrated here when she was a year old, and has been living in New York with her brother and parents ever since.
She hopes to pursue a career in Emergency Medicine, and hopes to be able to do global humanitarian relief work in the future. Syeda is very involved in Hope Foundation for Women and Children in Bangladesh. This organization works to set up free-medical clinics in remote villages in Bangladesh.
Syeda applied to the Medical Humanities Scholars Program to learn how to better communicate, be empathetic, and gain the trust of her patients. She wanted to meet like-minded individuals, that did not see patients as a list of illnesses, but rather as people that come to doctors when they are at there weakest. She strongly believes that “Medicine is more then just treating an illness. It’s befriending a person, gaining their trust, and not only being the best doctor you can be, but also the best person you can be.”
Mark D. Sugi
Mark is a third-year medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) at UCLA in southern California. His principal clinical interests are trauma surgery, surgical critical care and pancreatic oncology. As an undergraduate he studied Italian Literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
He joins the Medical Humanities Scholars program in recognition of the important balance that a doctor must strive to achieve: that which comprises scientific knowledge and an understanding of the biology underlying human disease; the provision of high quality patient care based on evidence-based practices; and the capacity to empathize, comfort and support a patient through a difficult time in his or her life.
Mark currently serves as the medical education representative for the Class of 2011 at DGSOM and as a graduate student representative in the UCLA Graduate Council and University of California Systemwide Academic Senate. His interests in medical education have most recently led him to a position working with the First Aid/USMLERx team. In his free time he enjoys budget traveling to the Mediterranean, skiing and studying theology.
Ingrid Berg
Ingrid is a second-year medical student at the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine in Downers Grove, Illinois. Before medical school, Ingrid worked in publishing, was a stay-at-home parent, and was an aquatics professional for nearly 20 years as a coach, lifeguard, and swim and water aerobics instructor.
Before joining the Medical Humanities Scholars Program, Ingrid participated in a nationwide program called Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care at a hospital in suburban Chicago. The goal of the program is to respect the diversity of experiences in a health care setting and to improve patient care by increasing empathy and compassion through the portal of literature.
For Ingrid, participating in the Medical Humanities Scholars Program is a foundational experience to help her achieve her goal of establishing a medical humanities program at a medical school that has yet to implement one, or to teach in an already existing program. She would also like to contribute to the growing body of medical humanities literature—non-fiction and essays—blending her experience as an undergraduate journalism major, a current medical student, and a future practitioner.
Ingrid has a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. As an undergraduate, she studied in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1992, on the cusp of the country’s peaceful split into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The semester was sponsored by the National Collegiate Honors Council and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.