Anna Harmeling, a 2026 Pisacano Scholar, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School. Originally from Boyne City, Michigan, a small town in northern Michigan, Anna spent most of her childhood on her grandparents’ two farms: one raising cattle and one growing Christmas trees. Her family has lived on the same road for over six generations, giving Anna incredible support and love throughout her life.

Anna attended Stanford University where she received her bachelor’s degree in management science and engineering. Growing up in a rural community, and seeing the impacts of low healthcare access, she hoped to pursue a path focused on health systems research and policy. During undergrad, she began working with the National Rural Health Association and was selected to serve on a sub-advisory committee for President Biden’s Covid-19 Health Equity Taskforce. Through this, she developed a love for public health and chose to pursue her master’s degree at Stanford in Community Health and Prevention Research. Anna’s interest in addiction medicine led her to research gender differences in alcohol use disorder treatment with Stanford’s Prevention Research Center. She has continued to work with this research group throughout medical school and has used these opportunities to reconsider ways that substance use treatment can be delivered to rural communities.

As much as Anna loved working in these different sectors to impact rural health, she realized that she did not just want to think about these problems abstractly, she wanted to also become a physician that served a rural community directly. Knowing her passion for public health, addiction medicine, and rural health, she started medical school set on family medicine as a specialty, and that feeling has only solidified since. Anna hopes to integrate primary care with public health in her future career. She was most grateful for the opportunity to work with her local health department during medical school to rotate through local clinics, attend home visits, perform restaurant inspections, participate in school health outreach, and work on a research project analyzing a community health needs assessment across multiple counties in northern Michigan.

Anna has also continued to engage in many of the things she has loved since childhood. Anna was a state champion pole vaulter, and since graduating she has continued to coach both at Boyne City High School and at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School. Anna serves on the advisory committee for her alma mater high school’s sports broadcasting program, a position she received after working for many years in sports broadcasting at Stanford. She plays stand-up bass with a bluegrass band and participates in ski patrol at Boyne Mountain. For her, family medicine is not just about being a physician, it is about being someone who is part of a community. Anna attributes her success to the support of her own community and hopes to one day serve as a small-town family medicine doctor in every sense of the title.