Newsroom

Structural racism and discrimination (SRD) shapes persistent health disparities by limiting access to care and by directly affecting health and health behaviors. Most research on SRD in the health sector, however, has focused on Black Americans and Latinx. Now, thanks to a new five-year, $4 million grant award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers at the Center for Asian Health, Lewis Katz School of Medicine and Fox Chase Cancer Center have an unprecedented opportunity to expand SRD research to include Asian-Americans.

In scientific research, it’s thrilling to uncover something new, something never documented before. Just as thrilling is to win grant funding to keep that exploration going. Super-competitive, grants and fellowships are difficult to apply for and hard to get. It is always a coup to land one. But there’s something extra special about those first few wins. Just ask Amanda St. Paul and Keman Xu, doctoral candidates in the Biomedical Sciences program at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine. They’re both on cloud nine, celebrating brand-new, highly prestigious fellowship awards for their research.

In selecting the Class of 2026, the Lewis Katz School of the Medicine for the first time included the perspectives of North Philadelphia community members, who interviewed each of the prospective medical students and had a say in the Admissions Committee’s decisions.