Anastasia Abongnelah is originally from Cameroon, West Africa . She earned her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at University of Maryland and will complete her final year at Meharry Medical College (MMC) in 2025 with an interest in Internal Medicine. During her time as a student at MMC, she worked with Dr. Michael Caldwell for over three years in several roles. She became the first ever student teaching assistant in the Social Foundations of Medicine (SFM) course with Dr. Caldwell as course director. SFM is course that is focused on Public Health, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics. After successfully completing two years with Dr. Caldwell as student TA, the positive impacts of peer teaching were analysed and presented at Meharry Scholarly Innovation conference in 2023. Following this presentation, she and Dr. Caldwell worked together to create a student TA program which enabled other students to participate as peer teachers for SFM.

Anastasia Abongnelah also represents Meharry nationally to the American
Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) as a part of the Organization of Student Representatives (OSR) with Dr. Michael Caldwell as faculty advisor. In the AAMC, she served further in leadership roles as regional delegate officer and member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. Anastasia is passionate about public health policies, medical education, and healthy equity. This passion stems from her own background as a Cameroonian, where she grew up seeing a gap in access to
medical care.

 

Anastasia envisions a future where she can utilize her experiences to advocate for health care policies that combat health disparities, work together with her peers in medicine to learn new ways to positively impact medical education and to establish non-profit health organizations that will improve healthcare accessibility in underserved communities locally and globally, including her native home country, Cameroon.