After Ivana’s mother was exiled from Cuba, she migrated to New Jersey and started a family. Ivana grew up speaking fluent Spanish, and as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she obtained several grants to fund independent health systems research in Cuba.

Katz was an attractive option for med school due to its focus on the social determinants of health and “very generous” scholarship packages.

Temple-trained. In medical school, Ivana benefited from Temple’s preclinical curriculum, which emphasized viewing each patient through a historical lens and considering how the legacies of racist policies like redlining continue to impact health outcomes in Philadelphia. Then she was able to put that training to work in clinical rotations at senior centers in North Philadelphia and at the St. Luke’s University Health Network in the Lehigh Valley.

Going global. Before beginning her medical education, Ivana spent a year at the American University of Rome, earning a master’s degree in peace studies and conflict negotiation to add to her professional toolkit.

Now a resident physician in the global health equity program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Ivana continues to travel internationally, splitting time between caring for patients at home and abroad. Lesotho, a small, landlocked country surrounded by South Africa and known for its high rates of tuberculosis, has become a repeat destination, where Ivana spends four-week stints working in a hospital for patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and visiting remote rural areas in the mountains to see patients with limited healthcare access.