Claire Romaine, a 2024 Pisacano Scholar, is a 4th-year medical student at Tulane University School of Medicine, where she is also pursuing an MPH in Disaster Management and Environmental Health. Raised in Frostburg, Maryland, an Appalachian town of 7,000 people, she was first inspired to pursue a career in health by her mother, a general dentist and advocate for access to care.

As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Claire was the inaugural recipient of the Hannah Graham Memorial Award, which supports public health research in French-speaking settings. Through this award, she completed internships and research in Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Rwanda. These experiences helped Claire to realize that she could make the strongest impact, even in large international organizations, if she had the experience and voice of a physician. Fortunately, the Human Biology Distinguished Major Program allowed her to combine her interests in international affairs and global health with preparation for medical school. Her love for medicine grew through three summers working at Camp Holiday Trails, a camp for children with medical needs. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2018.

After college, Claire worked as a population health project manager at Epic, the electronic health record giant. She contributed to some of Epic’s early projects incorporating health insurance claims data into care management, population health, and C-suite decision tools. She considers this time a unique education in the future of healthcare delivery. Epic is also where she first assisted in a hospital wildfire evacuation (from behind the scenes), met a disaster medicine physician, and became interested in this career path.

Claire chose Tulane School of Medicine specifically for the unique opportunities to study disaster medicine, both through the MPH in Disaster Management and the lived history of the providers and people of New Orleans. She has interned with both the New Orleans Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness and the Department of Health. This has included fieldwork during COVID-19, mass vaccination, multiple hurricanes, extreme temperature events, extended power outages, mpox outreach, and Mardi Gras. Claire later received an NIH (National Institutes of Health) Clinical and Translational Science Award to continue her disaster medicine studies through mentored research. She spent the 2023-2024 school year as a full-time researcher studying medication adherence during hurricane season among adults with hypertension.

Claire is an aspiring full-spectrum family physician looking to serve a community facing the intersecting challenges of rural healthcare delivery and the climate crisis. Through medical school rotations with both American Indian and Alaska Native populations, she has witnessed unique healthcare delivery models being directly challenged by climate change. She hopes to serve a rural community through regular clinical care and environmental health support, as well as find a way to practice disaster medicine during major international responses.

Claire and her husband, an aspiring emergency medicine physician, are looking forward to continuing their passion for gardening and ecological volunteering wherever they match for residency. Claire loves to spend a long weekend supporting her brother, an independent filmmaker, on his film shoots.