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Amelia Papadimitriou knows what she wants to accomplish throughout her career.
“My mission is to advance health equity,” says Papadimitriou, a third-year medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) who plans to focus on emergency medicine. “It’s my passion, my purpose, my why.”
That passion has taken her across the globe, from her home in Montréal, Canada, Puerto Rico, Peru, Ecuador, New York City, and now Milwaukee. Originally interested in global health, her experiences as a Master of Public Health student working for the New York City Department of Health during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and now as a medical student in Milwaukee have taught her that health care challenges she witnessed abroad are also prevalent in the US.
“I realized that a lot of health disparities I saw in low-income countries in the Global South also exist here right in our backyard,” Papadimitriou says. “Milwaukee is like a perfect laboratory for that.”