Meet the Fellows: Dr. Alexandra Stanculescu
During HEAL Initiative’s two-year program , UCSF fellows are paired. Each fellow rotates between at an underserved domestic and international site. At each location, HEAL Initiative fellows work closely with local counterparts selected by our partner organization. These counterparts will also participate in the HEAL Initiative curriculum.

Meet the Fellows: Dr. Alexandra Stanculescu

Alexandra’s interests include Global and Community Health, and she is an advocate of the right to health care for all people. A believer in health education, she has worked to develop community health programs in India and Ecuador, as well as developing interactive e-Learning for the medical and scientific industry in the US. She received an M.A. from San Francisco State University in Integrative Health Education and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis on Neuroscience.  She completed residency in Medicine and Pediatrics at Tulane University in New Orleans. (more…)

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Bloody Diamonds

There are no paintings on the walls in the hospitals I have worked at in the capital of Liberia over the past five years. The bareness on the walls parallels the limited equipment I have on hand to care for patients with bacterial meningitis, pericardial tuberculosis, and malaria. Listening to some of these patients or looking at their chest films without the benefit of modern technology, I get the feeling I am seeing pathology in its most extreme form—the way people saw it when the diseases we now treat routinely in the United States were first discovered. Listening to the sandpaper sound of one man’s pericardial rub, I think, “Oh! That’s why we call it a ‘rub!’” (more…)

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