Master’s Commencement: Celebrating Mount Sinai’s Outstanding Class of Graduating Master’s Students

Updated on Jul 12, 2024 | Featured

Amid loud cheers and applause, master’s students at Mount Sinai’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences celebrated their many accomplishments—and the promise they hold for advancing science, health, and medicine—at a Commencement ceremony on Friday, June 21.

There were 176 graduates in the Class of 2024 across nine programs: Master of Science in Biostatistics; Master of Science in Biomedical Science; Master of Health Administration; Master of Science in Health Care Delivery Leadership; Master of Science in Biomedical Data Science; Master of Science in Clinical Research; Master of Science in Genetic Counseling; Master of Science in Epidemiology; and Master of Public Health.

Student speaker Kiran Nagdeo, BDS, who had entered the Master of Public Health program two years earlier after having started her career in dentistry, addressed the graduates with optimism.

Student speaker Kiran Nagdeo, BDS

“Each of us chose Mount Sinai for different reasons, but we all shared a common goal: to advance human health and contribute to the well-being of society,” she said. “During our studies, we engaged with leading experts, participated in groundbreaking research, and immersed ourselves in hands-on experiences.

“As we move forward, let us carry with us the core values instilled by Mount Sinai: integrity, compassion, and a relentless pursuit of knowledge. Let us remain curious, continue to ask questions, and never settle for easy answers. The road ahead may be challenging, but we are well-prepared to face it with courage and determination.”

Presiding over the ceremony were Marta Filizola, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Dean for Academic Affairs, Icahn Mount Sinai, and Chief Scientific Officer, Mount Sinai Health System.

Marta Filizola, PhD

“With your advanced degrees, you are now prepared to play a role in creating the future,” Dr. Filizola said. “You will work to understand and prevent threats to public health. You will compile and analyze biomedical data to generate new insights that can improve human health. You will build research studies that can yield the clinical breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. You will help families understand genetic risks, and prepare them for what may be the greatest challenge of their lives. You will be called upon to counsel health care professionals confronting the most complex bioethical challenges. You will help manage hospitals, and, perhaps one day, run a hospital—or an entire health system. All of this is very noble work.  Your future is bright, very bright, because science and medicine need you.”

Dr. Filizola is also the Sharon & Frederick A. Klingenstein/Nathan G. Kase, MD Professor of Pharmacological Sciences, Professor of Neuroscience, and Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health.

Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD

In his speech, Dr. Nestler focused on Mount Sinai’s excellence in public health.

“Most of today’s graduates will be receiving their degrees in a field related to public health, and our nation needs your newly honed expertise more than ever,” he said. “This year marks a major milestone for Mount Sinai—this spring we created a new academic Department of Public Health and we recruited one of our own stars, Dr. Rosalind Wright, as the founding department chair,” he said as he introduced Rosalind Wright, MD, MPH, to the audience. “She will also serve as Mount Sinai’s first Dean for Public Health. These initiatives represent a major investment by Mount Sinai in public health, with a firm commitment to expand the scope and depth of our educational, research, and community outreach programs.” Learn more about Dr. Wright, a renowned physician, researcher, and educator, in this Q&A.

Dr. Nestler continued: “While our local and national communities represent a major focus of Mount Sinai’s work in public health, we must extend our efforts to international communities to advance global health.” He added, “And, a greater focus in public health is needed to identify and correct health disparities and the social and environmental factors that contribute to them. Mount Sinai’s Institute for Health Equity Research will be a crucial partner in our enhanced public health initiatives to achieve tangible progress in this important priority in health care.” Dr. Nestler is also Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience and Director of The Friedman Brain Institute.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, MPH, Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health, was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Dr. Galea is a population health scientist and epidemiologist, author, physician, and one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences. He has dedicated his career to understanding the social causes of health, mental health, and the consequences of trauma and working to shape the field to disrupt them and to change the lives and trajectories of people around the world.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, MPH

In his Commencement address, he challenged each graduate to create a healthier world, guided by three pillars—epistemic humility, radical compassion, and reform through reason.

“Humility,” said Dr. Galea, “is the understanding that there are always limits to what we know. We can and should be in the business, always, of expanding these limits, but we will never reach a point when we can say we have learned it all. Humility recognizes this, allowing us to learn from what others can teach us. When we think we know it all, we are less likely to open our minds and our ears in our dealings with other people. Humility enables us to learn.”

Dr. Galea told the graduates there is a difference between empathy and compassion. “Like empathy, compassion helps us to see the world through the eyes of others…Empathy might allow us to feel what another feels. Compassion helps us go further, urging us to ask why they feel the way they do. When we do, we can see the political, social, and economic factors that underlie the health of many…Compassion calls on us to act, to make a better world. This is why it is radical.

“Reform through reason,“ he continued, “is ultimately about data and the incremental work we do every day to make the world better. Everything we do should rest on a foundation of consequential, rigorous, and inquisitive science. Guided by these principles, our science can help get us to the better, healthier future we all want. But it will not do so overnight. This is where it becomes necessary to embrace what I have called “radical incrementalism” in our work. [It] means working patiently, pragmatically toward the radical goal of a healthier world for all. And this goal is radical indeed—it means building a world that is optimized for health at every level.”

Click here to meet six graduates from Mount Sinai’s master’s programs and learn more about their experiences and passions.

Click below for a celebratory slideshow of graduates.

 

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Mount Sinai Creates a New Department as it Reenvisions Public Health Education, Research, and Practice for the 21st Century

Updated on Jul 12, 2024 | Featured, School

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH

Building on its long history of groundbreaking science and advocacy in public health, and its research strengths in exposomics, genomic sciences, genetics, and big data analysis, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has established a Department of Public Health to address the urgent and mounting medical and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Renowned physician and researcher Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, was named Chair of the department and inaugural Dean for Public Health. Dr. Wright is Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and, most recently, the former Dean of Translational Biomedical Sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai. She is a founding Co-Director of the Institute for Climate Change, Environmental Health, and Exposomics, the nucleus of Icahn Mount Sinai’s work on studying environmental exposures and their effects on development, health, and disease across the life course.

Dr. Wright, who has authored or coauthored more than 350 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered more than 150 regional, national, and international presentations, has long been committed to mentoring the next generation of public health scientists, having trained nearly 100 predoctoral and doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows over her career.

Bolstering these efforts is Icahn Mount Sinai’s extraordinary research capabilities, which include being ranked No. 4  among U.S. medical schools in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for Public Health, and No. 2 for Genetics (Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research 2023 fiscal year), and No. 1 nationally in National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences funding.

In the following Q&A, Dr. Wright discusses the transformative steps that will further strengthen Icahn Mount Sinai’s leadership in public health education, research, and practice.

Mount Sinai has been on the front lines of public health for decades. Why a Department of Public Health now?

We’re already widely recognized for our strengths in exposomics, genomic sciences, genetics, and big data analysis. And our public health research and advocacy work has frequently raised our national profile through studies, symposia, and testimony we’ve given before congressional committees looking into public health reform. By carefully assessing that repertoire of strengths—which often is the envy of others in the field—and bridging them, we can create a public health ecosystem that would allow our teams to cohesively share new knowledge, skills, and technology.

How, specifically, do you envision this?

Imagine if we could seamlessly marry the work of our environmental scientists in exposomics and genomics with the work of our computational and computer scientists. We could bring those data streams together even more than we are already doing and factor in our artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise to make sense of data patterns and profiles involving thousands of variables. The result would be revelations and gains in the field of public health not possible in the past.

How do you get there?

One of the ways we plan to set the stage for those breakthroughs is cross-training our students and workforce. Our goal is a transdisciplinary trained workforce so that MDs, PhDs, and other clinicians have the skills to understand climate science, for example, and to use data science methods, such as machine learning, to more precisely identify health-relevant environmental and genetic factors impacting all of our patients. Likewise, we want our data scientists to acquire the same basic skills in epidemiology and environmental health sciences to enable team science. Those ambitious goals will clearly require innovation and change around public health education at Mount Sinai.

We’ll be establishing doctoral programs in public health areas where our research and practice can lead the field, such as climate science and exposomics. But first, our plans are to expand our Master of Public Health programs to synergistically feed into planned doctoral programs. The public health programs were created in 2001 and are the oldest and largest graduate studies at Mount Sinai. We want our new department to be not just an academic home for investigators and public health practitioners, but an incubator for real curricula innovation.

We have what I see as a key advantage over other institutions in the field that will fortify our work: Mount Sinai Health System and Icahn Mount Sinai serve the greater New York City region, which includes East Harlem, an area of Manhattan that has one of the most diverse patient populations in the United States. It amounts to a laboratory rich in socioeconomic strata perfectly suited for research and clinical and public health practice. Just as importantly, we’ve advanced our science through programs like the BioMe®️ BioBank Program, with its tens of thousands of DNA samples driving genetic, genomic, and epidemiologic investigations, and through the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program, where we’ve woven genetics into real-world clinical care and have a goal to sequence 1 million Mount Sinai patients.

All of these approaches are essential if we are going to reinvent our response to the kinds of public health challenges we are seeing today—which are the same challenges we urgently need to address as a health system, too—climate change and environmental exposures of children within their communities, which we know can lead to asthma, obesity, learning disabilities, and much more. These will disproportionately impact communities that are already more burdened by these disorders. Nothing will focus us more as a department than gaining a more-informed understanding of the nature and impact of health-relevant environmental hazards that may contribute to health disparities in our communities.

You are building on a formidable legacy. What are the most impactful discoveries Mount Sinai researchers have made over the decades?

Uncovering the impact of asbestos on human health has been among the most consequential. Our work can be traced to Dr. Irving Selikoff, a pioneering researcher, who created in the 1960s the nation’s first hospital division of occupational medicine at Mount Sinai. His research on asbestos-related disease shaped public policy for working men and women around the world. It was also responsible for the landmark 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act.

More recently, we’ve actively studied per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the class of synthetic chemicals ubiquitous in the environment and our bodies. Our investigators have developed novel metrics to gauge our cumulative exposure to PFAS and have shown how that exposure is linked to significant reductions in female fertility, as well as child health outcomes, such as asthma. We’re proud that our science is now informing regulatory change around PFAS, undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2023.

My own lab has done considerable work with air pollution exposure. We were among the first to link that exposure to asthma onset, as well as to cognitive dysfunction in children in early life, and to show that this starts in utero and weighs disproportionately on low income and ethnic minority populations. We were also among the first with research to show that psychological stress in pregnant women puts their babies at higher risk of developing conditions like asthma, given the impact of stress on the immune system.

What excites you most about your new role?

My passion throughout my career has been public health—from the time I started my fellowship in pulmonary medicine and felt the sudden need to get a Master in Public Health degree. I realized that this knowledge would help me to better understand the disparities I was seeing in my asthma patients—disparities I knew couldn’t be explained by heritability or genetics alone, which led me to studying broad environmental influences as well. In the same way, I feel I’m now in a position to do something really unique as the new Dean for Public Health—to translate the scientific capabilities that we can collectively bring together to improve the health of our communities. And there’s no better place to accomplish that than at Mount Sinai.

Watch a video to learn more about the vision for Public Health at Icahn Mount Sinai.

World Trade Center Health Program Hosts a Delegation From the Netherlands to Discuss Lessons Learned by Caring for 9/11 Responders

Updated on Jul 10, 2024 | Community, Featured

The World Trade Center Health Program Clinical Center of Excellence (CCE) at Mount Sinai recently welcomed occupational medicine physicians and public health advocates from the Netherlands on a study trip to learn about the mental health impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on first responders.

The event, held Tuesday, June 11,  focused on sharing two decades of experience caring for 9/11 responders living with the enduring effects of exposure to psychological trauma and environmental toxins.

Franz van den Nieuwenhof, MD, an occupational medicine physician from VerzuimConsult in the Netherlands, a leading consulting firm providing occupational health support to employers, noted the significant increase in mental health issues among Dutch health care workers following the COVID-19 pandemic, similar to those experienced by responders after 9/11.

“In our search for possible solutions, we came across references to the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to 9/11. This literature emphasized the extensive experience that New York has gained in the treatment and support of PTSD patients since the 9/11 attacks,” he said. “During our quest for new insights, it became clear that the WTC Health Program played a big role in this work, with connections to the expertise of specialists from The Mount Sinai Hospital. We are confident that we can learn much from their approach.”

From left: Franz van den Nieuwenhof, MD, Sandra M. Lowe, MD, and Michael Crane, MD, MPH

Sandra M. Lowe, MD, Associate Professor, Psychiatry, and Environmental Medicine, and Medical Director of the WTC Mental Health Program, delivered a presentation titled “9/11 Responder Mental Health: 20 Years of WTC Health Program Experience,” highlighting the association between disaster exposure and adverse health outcomes.

“Twenty years of research on 9/11 health outcomes has demonstrated not only the clear association between disaster exposure and adverse psychological effects, but also that there are meaningful actions we can take to treat trauma-associated conditions and alleviate suffering in disaster-exposed populations,” she said.

The WTC Health Program, a component of the Mount Sinai Selikoff Centers for Occupational Health, is the largest such center in the country and proudly cares for more than 25,000 responders at its Manhattan, Staten Island, Suffern, and Yonkers, New York, locations.

The panel also featured Agata Bednarska, MSW, Outreach and Education Manager, and Rachel Yehoda, MPH, Health Literacy Manager, who presented on mental health outreach and communication strategies. The meeting concluded with a discussion led by Kathryn Marrone, LCSWR, Director of Social Work, Amy Cushing-Savvi, LCSW, Assistant Director of Social Work, and Massielle Morales-Miller, LCSW, Social Work Supervisor, focusing on health monitoring, case management, and the role of psychosocial support in workplace wellness.

“To provide the highest standard of care to our responders, we have established a comprehensive case management and care coordination team,” said Ms. Marrone.

Michael Crane, MD, MPH, Medical Director of the Selikoff Centers, expressed gratitude for the opportunity to share knowledge with international colleagues.

“We hope our lessons learned and best practices will assist in establishing policies and programs around mental health,” he said. “Workplace health promotion programs have proven to be successful, especially when they combine mental and physical health interventions like we do through the WTC Health Program.”

In closing remarks, Dr. Lowe highlighted the WTC Health Program’s critical role caring for 9/11 exposed workers, and its dedication to sharing valuable knowledge.

“Our team is privileged to be part of the WTC Health Program and we are dedicated to contributing the insights we’ve gained to support initiatives that enhance mental health education and services, especially for individuals affected by trauma and chronic occupational stress,” said Dr. Lowe. “It’s a responsibility we take seriously.”

Learn more about the World Trade Center Health Program Clinical Center of Excellence at Mount Sinai

Marsha Sinanan-Vasishta Selected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing

Updated on Nov 4, 2024 | Featured, Nursing

Marsha Sinanan-Vasishta, DNP, MBA, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CPXP, FAAN

Marsha Sinanan-Vasishta, DNP, MBA, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CPXP, FAAN, Chief Nursing Officer, Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, has been selected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing (AAN). She was recently inducted during a ceremony that took place at the Academy’s annual Health Policy Conference in Washington.

Academy fellows are inducted in recognition of their extraordinary contributions to improve health locally and globally. With nearly 3,000 fellows, AAN comprises nursing’s most accomplished leaders in policy, research, administration, practice, and academia.

Dr. Sinanan-Vasishta has made many contributions to the nursing profession at Mount Sinai and beyond.

A board certified Nurse Executive, Dr. Sinanan-Vasishta was among the first nurses in the United States to earn Certified Patient Experience Professional certification. She co-chairs the Mount Sinai Health System’s Nurses Against Racism Committee to help create and sustain an anti-racist and equitable organization and foster equitable patient care within the communities served by Mount Sinai.

She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the OKB Hope Foundation, which provides health care access to rural populations in Ghana, Africa. She is also the nurse lead for Mount Sinai International Advisory Team’s collaboration with the government of Guyana, South America, to help improve health outcomes within the Guyana Public Hospital Corporation health system.

Dr. Sinanan-Vasishta serves as a voluntary adjunct faculty member of the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. She is also a member of the Transcultural Nursing Society, the American Nurses Association, the American College of Healthcare Executives, and the International Honor Society for Nursing, and she is a Fellow in the New York Academy of Medicine.

Read more stories about Nursing Excellence

Mount Sinai Recognized for Leading Efforts to Make Health Care More Sustainable

Updated on Jul 8, 2024 | Featured

The Mount Sinai Hospital, East Harlem

Many might not realize that hospitals, in addition to helping care for countless patients and employing many workers, also have a big impact on the environment—from the amount of waste they generate to the greenhouse gas emissions produced by energy use, including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and power for lighting and medical equipment. While not a main contributor to climate change, health care accounts for approximately 8.5 percent of U.S. domestic emissions.

Mount Sinai Health System is leading efforts to reduce the health care industry’s carbon footprint. The Health System recently received multiple Practice Greenhealth 2024 Environmental Excellence Awards, which recognize institutions that have demonstrated leadership in environmental sustainability in health care. The Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai West, and Mount Sinai Beth Israel received the Greenhealth Emerald Award, putting them within the top 20 percent of hospitals leading the way in environmental stewardship.

“We’re being accountable and trying to make an effort to be more sustainable in the care that we deliver,” says Muoi Trinh, MD, Medical Director, Sustainability, Mount Sinai Health System, and Associate Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, and Cardiovascular Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We care about our community and our carbon footprint and how we contribute to climate change affects our community in terms of air quality, pollution, and health.”

The Health System also received these awards from Practice Greenhealth, a leading sustainable health care organization:

  • The Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Morningside, Mount Sinai West, and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, received the Greening the OR Recognition Award, which recognizes hospitals that have made substantial progress to reducing the environmental impact from the operating room.
  • Mount Sinai Queens, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and Mount Sinai Brooklyn received the Partner for Change Award, which recognizes superior performance in environmental sustainability and health systems that have made substantive progress on eliminating mercury.

“The Practice Greenhealth awards are important because they allow us to compare Mount Sinai to others in the industry,” says Dr. Trinh, who leads sustainability initiatives at Mount Sinai Health System. “The awards give us metrics and tell us how we’re performing, so we know what areas we’re doing really well in and where we can improve.”

Slashing greenhouse gases in the operating room furthers Mount Sinai’s pledge to decarbonize health care, a commitment to pursuing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Sector Climate Pledge to reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Mount Sinai has also implemented a recycling program in operating rooms as part of a broader effort to reduce plastics across the Health System.

In cities like New York, where asthma rates are high, making hospitals more sustainable means keeping both the environment, and patients, healthy, since climate change is linked to chronic respiratory and pulmonary disease, according to Dr. Trinh.

“That’s part of the reason why it’s so important that we’ve become more responsible with how we think about how we deliver care,” she says.

Muoi Trinh, MD

A cardiac anesthesiologist for more than a decade, Dr. Trinh has seen firsthand how treating patients in the operating room can increase a hospital’s carbon footprint—from discarded plastic waste containers to anesthesia gases that pollute the air. To fix the problem, she has led efforts to reduce the most harmful anesthesia gases, which can contribute a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions from operating rooms, from Mount Sinai.

“That’s part of the reason I got involved and became a huge advocate of trying to change things,” says Dr. Trinh, who has been Medical Director of Sustainability since April 2023.

Under Dr. Trinh’s leadership, Mount Sinai achieved this aim in two ways—both of which played a role in receiving the Practice Greenhealth 2024 Environmental Excellence Awards. First, the Health System removed desflurane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide, from its inventory of anesthesia agents, and decreased the use of nitrous oxide, another anesthesia agent and potent greenhouse gas, by more than 75 percent. Second, the Health System investigated the piping system used to pump nitrous oxide into operating rooms, finding that most of this gas is lost from the bulk supply prior to reaching the anesthesia machine for clinical use. The Mount Sinai Hospital eliminated this problem at its campus by switching to smaller containers that attach directly to anesthesia machines.

“We’re hoping to continue this project over the course of this next coming year, to limit this loss all together, at all hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System” says Dr. Trinh.

The next goal is to collect a full inventory of greenhouse gas emissions across the Health System. “Then we can prioritize our projects targeting the most significant ones first,” she says.

Dr. Trinh hopes that by receiving recognition, Mount Sinai can inspire other hospitals throughout the United States to become more sustainable. “Ultimately, the end goal is for hospitals to work collaboratively to reduce emissions from the health care industry as a whole, so we can all be part of the solution,” she says.

Click here to learn more or to get involved in sustainability initiatives at Mount Sinai

Five Medical Students at Icahn School of Medicine Selected as Tillman Scholars, Recognizing the Contributions of Those in the Military

Updated on Jun 28, 2024 | Featured

In 2018, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai set out to welcome a new kind of student into the field of medicine when it established an institutional partnership with the U.S. Navy as a complement to its traditional pathway. This unique partnership, which the school has broadened to include all branches of the military, provides a streamlined pathway for active-duty service members to apply to medical school prior to completing their service commitment.

Borrowing from the school’s popular FlexMed program, which allows college sophomores to apply for early assurance of acceptance into medical school, the military pathway provides a mechanism for recruiting service members while integrating a layer of flexibility to ease the transition from their undergraduate careers.

In just six years since the program’s inception, the school has enrolled 20 military veterans, some of whom have been admitted through the traditional avenue of admissions while others were admitted through the early assurance program. Now the school is celebrating a major milestone: five medical students were named 2024 Tillman scholars by the Pat Tillman Foundation. Last year, three students received this honor.

Considered to be one of the most prestigious and selective scholarship awards for student veterans and spouses of veterans, the Pat Tillman scholarship provides funding to military veterans and spouses to pursue higher education and continue their service in a variety of professions, including health care. In total, nine Icahn Mount Sinai students to date have been named Tillman scholars.

“I am deeply proud of our five students and grateful for their service to our country and beyond. To be honoring the service careers of five veterans with this prestigious award is truly remarkable and a very special milestone for our school,” says David C. Thomas, MD, MS, MHPE, Dean of Medical Education and Chair of the Department of Medical Education at Icahn Mount Sinai.

Pat Tillman, a starting safety for the Arizona Cardinals, distinguished himself in the National Football League when he broke the franchise record for tackles in 2000. When the September 11 terrorist attacks took place, he walked away from professional football and joined the U.S. Army, serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, he was killed by friendly fire. His family started the Foundation to cultivate the next generation of leaders.

The 2024 Tillman Scholars from Mount Sinai are Pierce Ferriter, Michael Lemonick, Katrina Nietsch, Nicole Parkas, and Rico Pesce.

“We are deeply proud of our partnership with the military and our students, who bring invaluable background and perspective to medicine. Many years ago, we set out to become a welcoming and supportive champion and educator of our country’s distinguished veterans. And this exciting news suggests we are reaching this goal,” says Valerie Parkas, MD, Senior Associate Dean of Admissions and Recruitment, Icahn Mount Sinai.

About the 2024 Tillman Scholars

 

Pierce Ferriter

Former Lieutenant Pierce Ferriter served in the Navy with unique assignments as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Officer in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. After graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 2010, he commanded a platoon and deployed to the Horn of Africa, also known as the Somali Peninsula. In Somalia, he supported the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta in the actions against Al-Qaeda, disarming explosive devices and destroying terrorist weapons caches.

In 2014, he relocated to Guam and took command of a hostage rescue team planning, rehearsing, and conducting operations in the service of Special Operations Command Pacific. He met his wife, Anna, another naval officer, skydiving in San Diego, and they moved to Spain and got married in 2018. While she served as an EOD Company Commander, he led the Navy’s emergency response bomb squad in Europe. A rising fourth year medical student, he will graduate in 2025 and intends to pursue a residency in orthopedic surgery.

 

Michael Lemonick

Former Navy Lieutenant Michael Lemonick graduated with distinction from the United States Naval Academy in 2015 with a BS in Mathematics. While at Annapolis, he played on the varsity soccer team and completed additional studies in Istanbul, Turkey, and at the London School of Economics. He was inspired to serve others in a career in medicine after watching physicians provide lifesaving care to his parents for prostate cancer and breast cancer, and treating his sister for diabetes. However, it was first important for him to satisfy his competing desire to serve his country.

Following his graduation and commissioning as a Naval Officer, he completed a bilingual master’s degree in international affairs at Sciences Po in Paris, where he was selected as an Émile Boutmy International Scholar. He subsequently served two tours of duty onboard the USS Donald Cook, a guided-missile destroyer stationed in Spain, and accumulated more than 25 months at sea in support of national security objectives in the Europe and the Middle East. After serving as a Naval ROTC instructor at The Military College of South Carolina – The Citadel, he left active duty in September 2023. He is currently a rising second year medical student and aspires to be a surgeon.

 

Katrina Nietsch

Former Lieutenant Commander Katrina Nietsch graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a BS in Quantitative Economics and four varsity letters with the NCAA Division I women’s lacrosse team. Following commissioning, she began military flight training to become a Navy pilot. She received her Naval Aviator “Wings of Gold” in 2014 and deployed around the world flying the C-2 Greyhound, a twin-engine cargo plane. She piloted numerous MEDEVAC missions from aircraft carriers, which galvanized her interest in medicine. Inspired by one particular mission involving a patient needing critical care, she applied to medical school during her tour as an instructor pilot.

She was accepted to Icahn Mount Sinai via the Military Institutional Partnership with Mount Sinai in 2019 but deferred her acceptance to serve a final tour with Naval Special Warfare. She left the Navy in August 2022 after 11 years of service. She has a Masters of Science in Aeronautics and is now a third-year medical student. Her interests include veteran’s health, human rights advocacy, research, and mentorship. She lives with her wife, Jackie, and daughter, Rory, who was born in January. She hopes to match into an orthopedic surgery residency.

 

Nicole Parkas

Nicole Parkas was born and raised in northern New Jersey, where she was a first-generation high school and college graduate. She earned a BS in Biology from Montclair State University in 2016, followed by a BS in Medical Imaging in 2018 and was Valedictorian of the Rutgers University Diagnostic Medical Sonography Program. After graduation, she spent five years as a perinatal sonographer, delivering essential care to high-risk, underserved obstetric and gynecologic populations in New York City and Washington, D.C.

She mentors first-generation college students in New York City and founded a Rutgers Alumni Advocate program aimed at supporting sonographers as they navigate their transition to higher education and the workforce. Her husband, Josiah Parkas, served as a Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force and is currently pursuing a law degree at Georgetown University Law Center. She is an incoming second-year medical student.

 

Rico Pesce

Former Sergeant Rico Pesce joined the Army at age 19, aiming to serve his country and gain experience before pursuing medicine. After completing rigorous training, including Airborne School and the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, he became a Special Operations Combat Medic. He was then assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.

He completed five combat deployments to Afghanistan, serving as Platoon Medic, Company Senior Medic, and Battalion Aid Station Non-commissioned Officer in Charge. He provided point-of-injury care for numerous combat casualties and played a pivotal role in the management of a mass casualty event on base. On two deployments, he was selected for clandestine operations to advise and assist Afghan commandos. He was also the first openly gay Ranger in his unit.

After seven years of service, he was honorably discharged and went on to earn a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University, a joint Master’s in Translational Medicine from the University of California, Berkeley and UCSF, and a Master’s in Biomedical Sciences from New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. Currently, he is a rising second-year medical student. He plans to become an emergency medicine physician, focusing on innovations in disaster medicine.

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