2011-2012 Luce Scholar

Nazneen Uddin is from Detroit, Michigan and is currently a third-year medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School. She received a full-tuition Distinguished Student Leadership scholarship at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-D), where she studied pre-medicine and earned her Bachelor’s in history. During college, Nazneen wrote for her campus paper and worked as an orientation leader and tutor in the math and writing labs. She was also founder and president of Change for Change at UM-D, a philanthropic organization which collected over $3,000 in change for the 2005 Southeast Asia earthquake victims. For her activism and community service, she was named a Michigan Service Scholar. In April 2007, she was selected as the commencement speaker and recognized by the Chancellor as the valedictorian of her graduating class. Before starting at the University of Michigan Medical School in 2008, Nazneen studied Arabic at the University of Jordan as a recipient of the US Department of State Critical Language Scholarship and also in Cairo, Egypt. At the end of her first year of medical school, she was awarded several grants, which she used during the summer of 2009 to visit hospitals and clinics throughout Egypt. She learned about the health care system and conducted a research project comparing attitudes of women in urban and rural Egypt regarding breast cancer. She presented her findings at the International Breast and Cervical Cancer Symposium in the Middle East and Africa, held in Cairo in 2010. She currently plans to go into primary care, aiming to work with underserved populations in Detroit and focus on cross cultural health care disparities. She also hopes to continue promoting global health equity through international relief work and translational research.