CMS foundation helping students

Tuesday, November 01, 2016 12:36 AM

CMS Education Foundation 2015-2016 scholarship recipients

by Michael J. Campo, PhD, support staff, Colorado Medical Society Education Foundation

First-year students from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Karlie Gandee, Margaret Harrison and Kathryn Kalata, were each awarded scholarships from the Colorado Medical Society Education Foundation (CMS EF). Gandee and Harrison each received $5,000 and Kalata received $4,000.

CMS EF, a 501(c)(3) private foundation, has a mission to render financial support to select first-year medical students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine based on criteria such as the student’s financial status, academic achievement and desire to practice in rural or underserved areas upon graduation. Beyond scholarships, CMS EF supports education programs such as the Colorado State Science and Engineering Fair and the Education Program.

As CMS EF Board Chair Jerry Appelbaum, MD, FACP, stated, “The CMS EF Board is thankful for the generous support and financial contribution from CMS members who make our education scholarships possible.”

The scholarship recipients are as follows.

Karlie Gandee graduated first in her high school class of eighteen knowing she wanted to become a physician. At that time she also wanted to get as far away from her small hometown as possible, so she attended the University of Miami for two years where she was given the opportunity to study abroad in Europe. While living in Prague, she realized how much she missed her family and the small town community in which she grew up. She transferred to Colorado School of Mines with the continued goal of becoming a doctor. With the realization of how important her rural community was to her, her new aspiration was to return to it after finishing medical school.

Margaret Harrison is a Colorado native and a first generation college graduate. She is thrilled to have been given the opportunity to pursue her goal of becoming a well-rounded, dedicated, humanitarian physician at the University of Colorado. Her love for science began many years ago and has since grown into an intense passion for medicine and altruism. To get to this point, she has poured herself into every endeavor: dedicating time to academics, community service and jobs that have captivated her interest. She believes her background and experiences will serve as a strong foundation to build upon throughout school and well into the future as she continues to learn and grow as a person and as a health care provider. She says she is sincerely thankful for the granting of this scholarship, because without significant financial support she would not be able to realize her dream.

Kathryn Kalata grew up in Wisconsin and studied Biology at Northwestern University. As a medical student, she will participate in CU-UNITE and is interested in serving women and children lacking access to health care. After identifying needs in an underserved community consisting mainly of immigrants and refugees, she is creating a health curriculum for an Aurora elementary school and is helping families overcome barriers to health care, such as lack of insurance, language barriers, and other social determinants. She also started a project on racial disparities in infant mortality in which she and other health professions students are researching barriers to prenatal care for African American women. This is being done through community-based participatory research involving members of the affected community to discuss and address disparities. She is also looking forward to pursuing a Masters in Public Health in the coming years to learn about influencing the health of underserved populations on a larger scale.