Meet 2023 Award Recipient
Makda Getachew Zewde
Makda came to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from Ithaca College, where she majored in Biology with a minor in Writing. Before attending Icahn, Makda worked as a research specialist at the University of Chicago, studying the immune microenvironment of cancer, and earned her master’s degree in Biostatistics from Northwestern University, where she concentrated in Population Health Analytics. She entered the MD program in 2019.
While at Icahn, Makda served on the Student National Medical Association (SNMA) board as a Minority Association of Premedical Students (MAPS) Liaison, the Student Council steering committee as a URiSM representative, where she also co-founded and served on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (DEIA) subcommittee, and as a Students for Equal Opportunity in Medicine (SEOM) Families mentor. She also volunteered in the East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership (EHHOP), the student-run free clinic, as a senior clinician and teaching senior, and in the Medical Discovery of Careers (MedDOCs) program, an after-school program for high school students, as a mentor. She has been involved in several translational and clinical research projects, with a focus on cancer, and has published her research in multiple peer-reviewed journals.
Makda would like to thank her parents and sister for their unwavering love and support, which she has felt every day of this journey, even from thousands of miles away; her friends and extended family, near and far, who keep her grounded in love and who always remind her to have some fun; and her countless faculty mentors at Sinai who have supported and believed in her, and who inspire her to be the best version of herself. Makda will graduate with her MD degree and continue her residency training in General Surgery at UCSF.