Karl Reis

Karl is a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University in New York planning on a career in infectious disease and global health. Karl grew up on the island of Oahu in Hawaii and studied Biology and Global Health at Cornell University in New York. After graduating, he worked for two years in Mwanza, Tanzania, researching the epidemiology of non-communicable diseases in people living with HIV alongside Weill Cornell Medicine, the Mwanza Intervention Trials Unit (MITU) and Bugando Medical Centre. This deep exposure to international inequity in the burden of infectious disease inspired him to apply to medical school. After matriculating into medical school, Karl began collaborating with a team of tuberculosis researchers based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with whom he will complete the Benjamin Kean Travel Fellowship. This group is seeking to develop novel interventions to address the growing burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis and its associated morbidity and mortality by assembling insights from translational, clinical and social sciences. Karl is applying to internal medicine residency programs in order to take the next step toward a career as a clinician-scientist, focused on reducing inequity in infectious disease.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
An opportunity to cap my years of medical school working alongside global experts to address a set of issues that are among the greatest contemporary threats to human health; the social underpinnings of infectious disease inequality and antimicrobial resistance. This is an experience that will undoubtedly direct my career.