Student receives Fulbright Award

Matias Iberico to research pediatric tuberculosis among impoverished populations in Peru

Third-year medical student Matias Iberico has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to Peru in medical sciences, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced recently. Iberico is one of over 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2010-2011 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.

A student in the medical school’s five-year M.D./M.P.H. dual-degree program, Iberico has long been interested in global health, public health, internal medicine, pediatrics and infectious disease. The desire to conduct research uniting these interests led him to submit a proposal to the Fulbright program. Review commissions in both the United States and Peru selected Iberico for the award, which will fund his research for the full 2010-11 academic year.

Iberico will travel to Lima, Peru, in August and will spend 10 months working among impoverished, largely indigenous populations in the Ventanilla district, which lies north of the national capital and consists largely of shantytowns and slums. Iberico will work among dozens of researchers on the “Fighting Poverty to Control Tuberculosis” project led by Carlton Evans, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., of the Imperial College London's Wellcome Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Iberico was interested in working in Peru in part because of a personal connection to the country. He was born in Lima and lived there until the age of five, when his family moved to the United States. The family settled in Dayton when Iberico was 15, and he graduated from Chaminade-Julienne High School before obtaining a bachelor of science degree in molecular biology from Otterbein College.

Established in 1946, the Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide. Forty Fulbright alumni from 11 countries have been awarded the Nobel Prize, and 75 alumni have received Pulitzer Prizes.