News Releases

 7/10/06

First Scholarship Recipient Starts Summer Nursing in India

This month a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Nursing is traveling to India as part of a program to better train future health care providers in the field of global health.


Chad Yeager, 23, of Prairie Village, Kan., is the first to make the journey to Vellore, India, as a Robinson Scholar, an honor established in memory of the late Dr. David W. Robinson, professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at KU Medical Center.

Robinson, who died in 2003, traveled widely to teach generations of students in the science of reconstructive surgery. As a visiting professor he traveled to such far-flung places as Japan, Lebanon, India, Venezuela and Africa.


Dr. Mani Mani, a former burn specialist at KU Medical Center, helped spearhead the initiative to honor his mentor, Robinson, with the scholarship program. As health becomes more global, and epidemics such as West Nile virus, SARS and avian flu increasingly make headlines, programs such as this will take on added importance, he said.


"Students today are isolated from world health matters," he said. "Scholars in this program will receive unprecedented exposure to the international health community. And then the scholarship recipients will come back and share their newfound knowledge with others."


Although Yeager is the only scholarship recipient making the seven-week trip this summer, in the future, students from all three KU Medical Center schools -- Nursing, Allied Health and Medicine -- will travel under the program. The next wave will include seven recipients, representing all three schools, who will depart in early 2007 and stay four to six weeks.


The trip will involve plenty of hard work for Yeager, a native of McPherson, Kan. He will work at the Christian Medical College, an institution that includes a 2,112-bed tertiary care hospital, a leprosy clinic, and an extensive community and rural health program.


The Robinson Scholarship covers $800 in travel expenses for the recipients. The scholarship fund is managed by KU Endowment, an independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fund-raising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment is the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.

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