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Cooper student receives honor from American Medical Assoc.

CAMDEN A second-year student at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, whose academic and career focus is using research to better provide care to underserved populations, has won a prize from the American Medical Association's philanthropic organization.

CAMDEN A second-year student at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, whose academic and career focus is using research to better provide care to underserved populations, has won a prize from the American Medical Association's philanthropic organization.

Mitra Daneshvar, 26, is one of 10 medical students to receive the American Medical Association Foundation's 2015 Excellence in Medicine Leadership Award. Five others will also receive the award at a ceremony this weekend in Chicago: two residents, two early-career physicians, and a fellow.

The awards are presented "in recognition of strong, nonclinical leadership skills in advocacy, community service, public health, and/or education," according to the nonprofit group.

Raised in a Detroit suburb, Daneshvar graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 and received her master of public health degree from Yale University in 2013. With an eye toward using academic research to influence clinical practice, Daneshvar heard about Jeffrey Brenner, the doctor whose databased prevention and treatment work in Camden led to a 2013 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

Daneshvar said she wanted to be able to do research and clinical work in the future, with the goal of helping underserved populations by better understanding the specific issues they face.

"It's really important to have research and academics be a very important stepping-stone at the beginning, before you go on to develop a plan and make changes," Daneshvar said.

"It's easy to theorize. It's another thing to actually have that one-on-one communication with someone," she said.

At Cooper Medical School, Daneshvar has helped create a research initiative for the student-run free clinic, surveying patients and recording data on their issues and treatment into a database to start looking for macro-level trends and patterns.

"You start to recognize that a lot of the resources that they're not receiving, it's common across the board for a lot of people in that group," she said.

She also helped found the school's chapter of the American Medical Women's Association and its Cardiology Interest Group, and is a member of the student government. She works with Cathedral Kitchen to organize student volunteers, and has worked on research projects examining gender-based differences in medical care.

"It's really great to have been given this award … but I feel like I still have so much of my career, and this is just the beginning," she said. "It's very hard to think I'm already being recognized for something, and there's still so much I still have to do at this point."\

— Jonathan Lai