Sural K. Shah, a fourth-year student at Penn State College of Medicine, recently received a $2,000 scholarship from the Endowment for South Asian Students of Indian Descent (ESASID) Fund. Shah plans to specialize in internal medicine-pediatrics. She is also an active volunteer in underserved communities. While an undergraduate, Shah worked as a research assistant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the pediatric emergency department.
Before attending the College of Medicine, Shah was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which allowed her to work with under-privileged patients in Brazil, India, New Zealand and Switzerland. Shah was also named a John E. Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar in Lima, Peru, where she studied the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases in adolescents and drug resistant M. tuberculosis in children. Shah hopes to become an academic physician focused on clinical medicine, education, and epidemiological research related to infectious diseases and health disparities.