Eve Ameen

Eve is a second-year medical student at the Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York. She is original from Canada, so moving to the United States for medical school was a pretty big step, she said. Before coming to medical school she spent a gap year living in Spain and working as an English teacher. She loved the challenge of learning a new language, travelling alone all over Europe and meeting people. She has always been interested in global health and infectious diseases, so Eve said she was “super stoked” to be able to spend a summer in the Amazon doing research. In her free time she likes eating sushi, watching horror movies, going to the beach with her friends, and exploring the museums and restaurants New York City has to offer. She can't imagine doing anything else right now. Eve said that getting to learn so much while working toward a career where she can help people is extremely rewarding. 

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
The Kean Fellowship means a lot to me, as it has opened many doors and provided many opportunities that I couldn't have gotten otherwise. With the extra funding, we were able to buy cellphones and microscopes that will not only be used in this research project, but will be given to health promoters of the local community in Iquitos, Amazonias, Peru, so that they may continue providing rapid parasite diagnostic aide to their own community members. I am extremely grateful as well for the opportunity to attend a conference in the fall that will allow me to present the research we have been working on so hard for the past few months and in summer. It is an honor to be able to showcase what we learned and what we did to a group of esteemed faculty in the world of tropical medicine. 

What do you anticipate learning?
As they like to say, if we knew the outcome of a research project, we wouldn't need to do it. I'm starting the project with specific goals and a hypothesis to test, but it's hard to predict the reality of what may happen. Especially given the nature of the project: Its location in a very poor and rural area, its dependence on local subject participation, the integration between health teams in New York and Peru, and other factors. I anticipate that I will very quickly learn the importance of adaptation and working with changes. I will surely improve my Spanish skills, as few people working with us will be able to speak English. I anticipate learning a lot about social determinants of health when we directly visit communities in the field. I anticipate learning a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses as a researcher, team leader, communicator and doctor-in-training. We built this project completely from the ground-up and we are going to a community that no one from our school has gone to before, so I anticipate learning a lot as we navigate through the whole research process with the help of local teams. Most of all, I hope I will learn how to make an impact on communities that are afflicted by parasitic infections, now as a student and in the future as a physician.

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
I like tropical medicine because it allows me to study and interact with patients with infectious diseases. It isn't just about science but about how social determinants of health, poverty, sanitation, drug resistance and environment play a role in disease manifestation and spread. These interactions provide multi-faceted challenges that are what draw me a lot to the field. I also like the idea of living in different countries with different climates that each provide their own challenges, meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds, and working not just with other physicians or medical students but with pharmacists, nurses, researchers and public health professionals. To me tropical medicine is really interesting to learn about and even more interesting to be a part of, as I've learned since starting this research project in Peru. In this project we are evaluating the possibility of using smartphone-attached microscopes to perform rapid STH diagnosis in the field, eliminating the need to travel to faraway labs. This problem of accessibility seems to find its way into many topics of tropical medicine and is definitely one I am interested in solving. Other than parasite infections, I am interested in sexual education and how it plays a role in maternal and fetal health globally. I hope as I move along in my medical education and get more exposure to different specialties, I will discover even more about the role of infectious disease in medicine.