EVMS student is second in two years to receive AAMC Nickens Scholarships

September 22, 2006

Nehkonti Adams

NORFOLK—For the second year in a row, an EVMS student is one of five recipients nationwide of a prestigious scholarship.

If Nehkonti Adams, recipient of the American Association of Medical Colleges’ 2006 Herbert W. Nickens Scholarship, hadn’t ended up at EVMS, it might not have even happened. Adams didn’t always want to attend medical school—she wasn’t even sure she wanted to attend college.

After high school, Adams, now a third-year medical student at EVMS, joined the Navy. On visits to South America and Africa while on deployment, Adams saw such abject poverty, including a Brazilian family of four living on a cardboard box on the side of the street, that she decided she wanted to pursue a career in humanitarian work.

“I realized to do humanitarian work, I had to get an education,” Adams said.

Adams is the second EVMS student in two years to receive the award. Sloane York received the award last year. The scholarship is reserved for entering third-year medical students who have shown leadership in addressing educational, societal and minority health-care needs.

“It just shows the commitment to service that our medical students have and the model of service that our medical students provide for other medical students in the United States,” Paul Aravich, Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and anatomy and medicine, said of the two consecutive awards for EVMS students.

Dean Gerald Pepe, Ph.D., also praised Adams’s work.

“I am thrilled that an EVMS student has once again been recognized by the AAMC to be the recipient of this prestigious award,” Pepe said. “Our medical students have consistently demonstrated active leadership in service to others in the community and Nehkonti Adams sets a wonderful example for her fellow students.”

In his recommendation letter for Adams, Aravich cited the many student-initiated programs in which she played a major role, including leading the National Primary Care Week health fair program which attacks minority health issues, and an institution-wide program on World AIDS Day. Adams serves on a variety of student organizations, including as president of the EVMS chapter of the American Medical Student Association and as vice president of the Student National Medical Association, and has organized two mission trips to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

“It is clear that Ms. Adams clearly and effectively fights the battle against poverty and disease in some of the poorest places on earth,” Aravich wrote in his recommendation letter for Adams.

Aravich also called Adams “a relentless, effective and passionate leader who attacks health care equities in multiple ways at great personal sacrifice.”

As a surgical coordinator for an orthopedic surgeon in Washington, D.C., Adams became more aware of the difficulties some minority populations face here in the United States, including lack of insurance and higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and prostate cancer among African Americans.

Adams’s own family had to endure adversity when they came to the United States in 1986 to escape civil war in their native Liberia. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a registered nurse, had to start all over.

Her father took a job in a factory earning only $5 an hour. Her mother became a nurse’s aide, working for $7 an hour.

At one time, her parents had to resort to welfare to support their eight children. Today, her father is an anatomy and physiology professor at a community college in Minnesota and her mother is a registered nurse again.

“Just watching them, I learned about hard work and sometimes things happen to people in life that they don’t expect,” Adams said.

Adams hopes to specialize in infectious diseases.

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