The first lessons Briana Martin-Villa learned about health didn’t come from a classroom. They came from long days in orchards, working alongside her mother and twin brother as their family migrated between California’s Central Valley and Eastern Washington following seasonal harvests. There, she saw the realities many farmworkers face: physical strain, pesticide exposure and illnesses […]
On a busy autumn day at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, nearly 70 students from Federal Way High School stepped into the world of healthcare—listening to heartbeats, testing reflexes, and asking big-picture questions about their futures. The experience was part of Healthcare Explorers Day, a hands-on outreach event organized through the Family Medicine Interest […]
For first-year Seattle medical student Nick Talley, the path to medicine began long before he ever opened a textbook. Talley spent 20 years on active duty in the US Army, serving as a Special Forces Medical Sergeant—better known as a Green Beret—from October 2002 to October 2022. Stationed with the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) […]
Buddy Kalani Kumupaʻa Seto-Myers “Aloha mai kākou! ʻO wau ʻo Buddy Kalani Kumupaʻa Seto-Myers. I am Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and a second-year medical student at the University of Washington School of Medicine.” Though his family’s homelands are in Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi, Buddy grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Hawaiian […]
When Lessly Tapia Torres was a child, she was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy. Her mother was told there were few options for follow-up care because of their immigration status. For Lessly, that moment was formative. “I remember watching my mom fight for me, while seeing other families struggle in the clinic,” she recalls. “It opened […]
