Claire Young

Claire is a medical student at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City interested in global health, infectious diseases and expanding equitable access to care. She has an MPH in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases and a BA in Global Affairs from Yale University in Connecticut, with a focus on HIV+ Key Populations. She has conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Burkina Faso and Kenya, and worked at UNICEF, Medecins Sans Frontieres and the CDC. In her free time, Claire enjoys traveling, dancing and reading fantasy novels.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in Botswana while in medical school and to join the ASTMH community of researchers. The support of the Kean Fellowship gave me the opportunity to learn from physicians managing patient care in a high-burden HIV environment with completely different epidemiology from my home institution, skills that will empower me to be a better provider in the future.

What do you anticipate learning?
The Kean Fellowship allowed me to spend six weeks in Molepolole, Botswana, rounding in the female medical ward and conducting a qualitative study into long-COVID prevalence, perception among healthcare workers, and clinical management. I learned a lot about how to manage severe medical conditions with limited resources and navigate a completely different healthcare system, and created a tangible deliverable that will support clinical algorithms for long COVID in the future.

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
My interest in tropical medicine is rooted in expanding access to medical care and combatting systems of inequity. The concept of Neglected Tropical Diseases embodies how top-down approaches to healthcare can ignore millions of people, and I am interested in using research to address these injustices. I am also academically interested in infectious disease biology, as well as systems-strengthening to prepare for future pandemics.