PNC (Mercantile) Scholarship Endowment

Helen Cheung

Helen is a second-year medical student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a double degree in biochemistry and biology as well as a minor in secondary education. Helen is passionate about providing holistic care to her future patients, which not only addresses their medical concerns, but also the social determinants of health such as food, housing, job training, etc. She also is an advocate for people living with HIV/ AIDS and has led an Alternative Breaks Trip to volunteer with the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in New York. She has continued her dedication to service in medical school by volunteering with the Jacques Initiative and other UMB professional students to provide HIV outreach and screenings within the Baltimore community. Her interest in HIV is driven by the goal of becoming an advocate for people who are often stigmatized and marginalized in order to create meaningful change within an urban underserved area such as Baltimore, as a future physician.

Sarah Flynn

Sarah is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her undergraduate coursework in human biology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford University focused on the health of disadvantaged populations and the social factors that influence an individual’s well-being. Before starting medical school, she spent two years working at the Johns Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Health Disparities on community-based health interventions designed to reduce hypertension disparities in Baltimore. At the School of Medicine, Sarah is an active member of the primary care track and worked to design and implement a clinical skills workshop for first-year medical students. She was inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha and the Gold Humanism Honor Society as a third-year student. Sarah earned a master's degree in primary care research from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. She plans to dedicate her career to practicing clinical internal medicine in disadvantaged areas while working to reduce health disparities through health services research and administrative responsibilities.