Kristie Hadley (Class of 2011), a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans, was the sole recipient of a four-year, $12,000 per year scholarship from the Medical School for International Health, in recognition of her extensive global health activities and interests, especially while working in Guatemala as a translator for the Pop Wuj community clinic and through her Ignacio Volunteers trips to Belize and Jamaica. Ms. Hadley, who was an Ignatian scholar at Loyola, graduated Magna Cum Laude and holds a degree in Sociology with a minor in both Women’s Studies and Pre-medical studies.

She is now in her first year of medical school, after completing the month-long  summer orientation “Introduction to Global Health and Medicine” which began in mid-July.

The MSIH, a collaboration between Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Columbia University Medical Center, is the only four-year, North-American style medical school that incorporates global health coursework into all four years of the medical school curriculum.  Located in Beer-sheva, Israel, medical students spend the first three years in Israel, and then return to New York to take their fourth-year electives at Columbia University Medical Center and its affiliates and other medical institutions in the US and Canada.  The capstone experience is an eight-week global health clinical clerkship in the spring of the fourth year, in supervised sites all around the world.

Now in its sixteenth year, the MSIH has over 385 graduates in residency, fellowship and private practice.  Graduates are expected to make significant contributions to global health through clinical work, policy development, research and medical education.

The MSIH attracts a significant number of Jesuit-educated applicants, and nearly 10% of the student body and alumni are from undergraduate and graduate programs from Jesuit institutions in the United States. The mission of the MSIH, to humanize medicine on a global scale, meshes well with the Jesuit philosophy of service to others, especially service to the poor and underserved.  Over 80% of MSIH graduates who have finished residency training are involved in one or more areas of global health work.