Isabella Welborn, who recently completed her first year as a master’s student in public health with a concentration in global health at the WashU School of Public Health, has won a Cancer Epidemiology Education in Special Populations (CEESP) fellowship from the City University of New York School of Medicine.
Funded since 2006 through a grant from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), CEESP is a national research training program designed to prepare public health students for careers in cancer epidemiology and cancer prevention and control. The program supports mentored research in global settings and among underserved and minority populations in the United States.
As a CEESP fellow, Welborn will travel to Bucharest, Romania, where she will study how geographic distance between patients’ homes and treatment centers affects outcomes in pediatric cancer. Her research will examine whether children living farther from care — particularly in rural areas — experience differences in survival, timing of diagnosis or access to follow-up care.
She hopes the findings will help inform strategies to improve access to care and support better outcomes for children with cancer in Romania.
