Alexander is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences and is considering a major in Health and Societies. He serves as a cabinet member in the Undergraduate Assembly as the Equity and Inclusion Director and is also an elected representative for the School of Arts and Sciences, all of which contribute to his interest in dialogue across difference and learning about the lived experience of others. He hopes to explore career options in medicine, policy, public health, or some combination of the three and wants to use his time as an SNF Paideia Fellow to do so. Alex believes in the power of his voice and the voices of others and feels that the human voice contains the power to change minds and heal hearts if only we are willing and brave enough to share.
Deepening his inquiry into how dialogue influences the policies that govern our day-to-day lives, Alex interned in the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 2022. “The internship has afforded me the opportunity to directly witness what dialogue and citizenship look like in our federal government, helping me better understand what works and doesn’t work to create encompassing change.”
In 2023, Alex was selected as one of 15 NIH Amgen Scholars from a pool of approximately 2,500 applicants nationwide. The Amgen Biotech company sponsors research programs at thirteen research/educational institutions. Each location has a different co-curricular focus, the NIH’s being health disparities and health policy. His lab assignment is with Dr. Brad Wood of the Center for Interventional Oncology, located in the NIH’s Clinical Center and he will be working on minimally invasive, imaging-guided cancer therapies, primarily for treatment of liver tumors.
Alex also had an abstract accepted by the Academy Health for their Annual Research Meeting conference’s student poster session. The abstract was based on the health equity research Alex did on COVID-19 vaccine allocation with the Penn Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy as a 2022 Summer Undergraduate Minority Research Scholar with the Penn Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics.
Alex anticipates that as an SNF Paideia Fellow, he will develop skills such as leadership, recognizing wellness, and effective speaking and listening, which are all related to his academic studies and the careers that they are aligned with.