Caroline Murtagh, a 2024 Pisacano Scholar, is a 4^th-year medical student and Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine. Originally from Andover, MA, Caroline graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences.

As an undergraduate, Caroline first developed a passion for community health while learning from resettled refugees during a summer working for a non-profit in Syracuse, New York. Over neighborhood dinners, they taught her the importance of locally driven solutions to conflicts structured by global inequities. She later traveled to Gulu, Uganda, to work in rural clinics, where she witnessed the devastating impact that nationwide blood shortages had on patients in need of transfusions. She returned to Uganda to research facilitators and barriers to blood donation in partnership with local blood collection agencies to inform campaigns seeking to increase donation rates, and she later received a Fulbright Research award to expand the study. This experience showed Caroline that research serves as a platform for elevating and crediting community voices in the development of programs and policies.

After college, Caroline worked for Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit committed to building high-quality healthcare systems in partnership with medically underserved communities. Through PIH, she worked in Liberia, where she supported the county health team to implement post-Ebola health surveillance interventions, and later in Massachusetts as one of the first contact tracers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She then traveled to Immokalee, Florida, a rural agricultural community, to coordinate the COVID-19 response alongside a coalition of community partners. Through these experiences, Caroline learned from colleagues and community members about the importance of empathy, resilience, and humility in advancing accessible and equitable healthcare systems.

In medical school, Caroline combined her interests in community health, research, and primary care. As the COVID director for Stanford Vax Crew, she collaborated with community partners to host mobile vaccine clinics throughout Central California, resulting in the vaccination of over one thousand people. She also led a team of community health workers (CHWs) and academic researchers in a participatory action research project that explored CHW perspectives toward the impact of professionalization policies on their workforce. Finally, she collaborated with peers on a variety of primary-care focused projects, including exploration of perspectives toward the COVID-19 vaccine in a rural community and identification of facilitators and barriers to community-based models of care delivery. She was awarded the 2024 Excellence in Public Health Award from the US Public Health Service Physician Professional Advisory Committee, and she was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society.

In her future career, Caroline plans to use the broad scope of practice offered through family medicine to work in rural, underserved, and international settings, and she looks forward to partnering with communities to develop accessible and equitable community-based models of care delivery.