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Throughout medicine, what was relegated to science fiction inthe 20th century is fast becoming reality in the 21st century. Some of the most intriguing breakthroughs are occurring inthe burgeoning field of neuroengineering, which enables thehuman brain and nervous system to interface with computersand machines.

In other words, we now have the capability of communicating directly with the brain using implantable devices and bioelectronics, and of recording the nervous system’s signals. This is a conversation that ultimately could lead to therapies that help patients with cognitive or speech impairments, spinal cord or traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

More than 200 years ago, British physician Edward Jenner changed the history of medicine when he inoculated a 13-year-old boy with vaccinia virus (cowpox) and demonstrated immunity to smallpox in 1796. Suddenly, there was a powerful new weapon in the long-standing war between humankind and disease-causing viruses. In the centuries since, millions of lives have been saved by vaccines against pathogens like smallpox, polio, and measles. However, for all the advances in vaccine science and all the success stories, some viruses have remained hard to vanquish—influenza and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among them.

Alana Jones, a Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) M.D.-Ph.D. student at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, was a Latin and biology double-major as an undergraduate at Howard University—unwavering, almost, in her plans to become a physician.

Then one summer she came to UAB for an NIH-funded program called PARAdiGM, which accepts outstanding college students from underrepresented minority backgrounds and introduces them to the concept of a career as a physician-scientist, a unique path for those who want to pursue both research and clinical medicine.

Research from UAB published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2022 suggests a gene therapy called LentiGlobin could provide a drastic improvement in quality of life for people with sickle cell disease (SCD). Julie Kanter, M.D., director of the UAB Adult Sickle Cell Clinic, says patients treated with this therapy are beginning to show signs of producing stable amounts of normal red blood cells containing hemoglobin. 

For decades, reports have warned of the looming shortage of primary care physicians in the United States. The problem is especially acute in rural areas, like much of Alabama—according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 62 of the Alabama’s 67 counties do not have enough primary care physicians to meet the needs of its population.

The Heersink School of Medicine’s Primary Care Track (PCT) aims to increase the number of medical students who pursue careers in primary care. Moreover, it is hoped that some of these graduates will practice in under-resourced, rural communities. Last May, the first cohort of Primary Care Track students graduated, 65% of which entered potential primary care residencies.

In February 2022, Mario Andres Espinosa Hernandez was nearing graduation from the UAB Heersink School of Medicine and was looking forward to Match Day in March, when he would learn where he has matched into residency. However, there was one more challenge for him to overcome—one that arrived unexpectedly and with higher stakes than any he had previously encountered.

It was an ordinary Tuesday when Espinosa Hernandez headed to the gym to work out. There, something happened that changed two lives in dramatic ways. “I was doing my workout, and out of the corner of my eye I saw my friend crouched over a girl who was lying on the floor, and he was motioning for me to come over,” Espinosa Hernandez says. “It looked like she was having a seizure.”

The quote “You can’t be what you can’t see” by civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman is one UAB Heersink School of Medicine 2014 alumna Brittney Anderson, M.D., often cites as her motivation to help mentor and recruit more Black students into the medical profession. The lack of role models and exposure to how one pursues a career in health care is an important factor in Black underrepresentation in medicine.

At age 6, Anderson made it her goal to serve others by becoming a physician. She says her ability to believe she could become something she’d never seen—a Black female physician—was due largely to her love of reading. Books transported Anderson, who grew up on a small family farm in Autauga County, to faraway places and opened her mind to other ways of life.

On September 20, 2022, 185 scholarship donors and medical student scholarship recipients gathered together at the Hilton Birmingham at UAB for the UAB Heersink School of Medicine Scholarship Dinner. It was the school’s first in-person Scholarship Dinner since the COVID-19 pandemic, and donors and students were excited to be able to meet each other, most for the first time.

The Heersink School of Medicine is fortunate to have an outstanding group of medical scholarship donors. Their generosity encourages young aspiring physicians during a critical moment in their lives and ensures the best and brightest are welcomed into the medical field regardless of their background. For the 2022-2023 academic year, the school distributed more than $4.5 million in scholarship dollars—an almost 8% increase over the previous academic year. Nearly a quarter of the medical student body received a scholarship this academic year.

Read on to learn more about two scholarships—one long-standing and one newly established—that support our students through their medical school journey.

In 2021, Michael Williams, M.D., a fellow in the UAB Department of Pathology, was motivated by the events surrounding the death of George Floyd to create a platform for more diverse voices in pathology. After being a guest on several podcasts, Williams decided to start his own.        

Williams moved to Birmingham for his Neuropathology fellowship after completing residency at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He says he spent months planning before launching Diversify in Path, a podcast that aims to highlight diversity in the field of pathology.