The American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation and the AMA Minority Affairs Section (MAS) recently named Dagoberto Ordonez, a second-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, a 2015 AMA Foundation Minority Scholars Award recipient.
Ordonez will receive $10,000 toward tuition assistance.
“This is such a great help for me and my family,” Ordonez said. “I am the first one to go to college in my family. This scholarship gives me a little more comfort in knowing that I won’t have as much debt. It’s an honor to be selected as one of the recipients.”
The Minority Scholars Award recognizes personal commitment to improving minority health and scholastic achievement. The scholarship targets groups defined as historically underrepresented in the medical profession.
“I was born and raised in Honduras,” Ordonez said. “My exposure to medicine prior to coming to the United States was through global health projects. It is an area I am very interested in.”
Ordonez will be taking a year off to spend 10 months in Honduras as part of the Vanderbilt-Emory-Cornell-Duke Consortium Fogarty Global Health Fellowship Program working with Douglas Morgan, M.D., MPH, associate professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt, on his study on gastric cancer prevention.
Ordonez is projected to graduate from Vanderbilt in 2018.