Moving Forward and Pushing Boundaries
Every three months, Dr. Christina Hanna (F’08, M’14) packs her bags and travels from Philadelphia to Butaro, Rwanda, where she treats young cancer patients.
“I don’t tend to take the traditional path,” says Hanna, recipient of this year’s Young Alumni Award from the Georgetown University Alumni Association. Since her freshman year on the Hilltop—when she talked her way into the School of Foreign Service’s Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) major as a pre-med student—Hanna has been pushing boundaries.
Among her many accomplishments, she earned a master’s degree in public health and recently completed a combined residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, at the same time volunteering in Rwanda to implement a pediatric leukemia protocol with the international organization Partners In Health.
Along the way, she found mentors who helped clear the obstacles. “Georgetown was an incredible launching pad,” she says. “I found an openness of thought that allowed me to keep moving forward in this crazy, cockamamie journey.”
Hanna started out as a biology major in the College. “At the suggestion of one of my floor mates in Harbin, I took David Edelstein’s class Intro to International Affairs.” she says. The course opened up a wider perspective to Hanna on the underpinnings of health—political, economic, and social. As the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, global health seemed like a perfect fit.
She met with Professor Charles Weiss, then STIA director. “He didn’t flinch when I said I wanted to study organic chemistry and international finance. He was nothing but supportive.”
Hanna became a constant presence in the office of STIA curricular Dean Mini Murphy. “I threw so many wrenches into the mix—I think I gave her a number of small heart attacks,” Hanna says. In her already overloaded sophomore year, Hanna decided she wanted to take intensive Arabic.
The first SFS student to be accepted early to Georgetown Medical School, Hanna took another slight detour, deferring for a year to develop youth smoking-cessation programs in Cairo as Fulbright Fellow.
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Hanna says. One day, she was being harassed just outside a youth center, and everything changed. “One of the children, who couldn’t have been more than 8, spoke up and said, ‘Don’t harass Miss Christina.’ For all they’d been through, to still come out the other side as compassionate, caring human beings—it was amazing.”
Her experience bridging cultures continues to serve her as she practices on both ends of the oncology spectrum in the U.S. and Rwanda. “The collaboration with my colleagues has shown me that good ideas have no boundaries. Together we can innovate to deliver better and more equitable global health care.”
Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu
