Students Earn Fellowships to Promote HIV Care in Swaziland

GS students Mayla Boguslav ’15 and Carmen Ervin ’16 have each been awarded a Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) Fellowship by ICAP at Columbia University. The MHIRT Fellowship consists of a fully-funded, 11-week, summer research training program, of which two weeks are spent in New York City, followed by an eight-week international placement. Both Ervin and Boguslav will be in Swaziland to assist with a research study exploring models of HIV care.

Glenn Novarr, Assistant Dean for Academic and Veteran Affairs, said that the MHIRT Fellowship provides a unique opportunity for students with diverse interests in “math, culture, and social justice to converge on questions of global health.”

In Swaziland, Ervin and Boguslav will work on the HIV patient study called Link4Health.

“Despite increased access to HIV testing, many patients with HIV never enroll in subsequent HIV care – and many who do enroll eventually drop out,” Ervin said. 

Boguslav added, “In Swaziland, ICAP is testing a strategy to prevent this, by making services more convenient, providing incentives to return, using mobile phone appointment reminders, and other innovations.”

Despite being placed in the same country, Ervin and Boguslav both expect to gain something different from the fellowship. Boguslav will use the fellowship as an introduction to public and global health research.

“The program will enable me to learn about global health research firsthand, by working on one of ICAP’s HIV implementation science studies,” she said. “My role will be to work with the ICAP team to monitor and improve data quality within the larger Link4Health study.”

Boguslav began at Columbia studying Jewish thought and premedical sciences as a student in the Joint Program with List College of the Jewish Theological Seminary, but has since changed the latter to mathematics. After graduation, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics, and in the long-term she hopes to work for a government agency in global health.

Ervin’s studies at Columbia focus on the cultural embodiments of racialized diseases and pathologies in marginalized communities.

“Through the MHIRT Fellowship, I hope to further explore how medical science creates, perpetuates, and deconstructs biological differences; its well-intentioned efforts to remove social determinants from conversations about scientific theory; and the tensions among cultural groups resulting from perceived genetic predispositions," Ervin said.

“The fellowship will offer me the necessary quantitative and qualitative research skills to combine with my social theory and ethnography background for a more nuanced understanding of social and biological interventions of minority health disparities,” Ervin added.

After the fellowship, Ervin plans to continue her studies in the interdisciplinary social sciences and to eventually pursue a Ph.D. She believes this fellowship will be an essential step to learning the kind of rigorous research methodology that she can use in her future research.

The MHIRT Fellowship is a fully-funded, research-focused fellowship for eligible undergraduates awarded by ICAP of Columbia University. It provides exposure to landmark findings and current challenges in global health and health disparities research and training in qualitative and quantitative research methods, among other experiences.

For more information about the MHIRT Fellowship, contact the GS Fellowships Office.