Matthew Akiyama

Matthew Akiyama is a fourth year medical student who completed his core clinical rotations at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. It has been clear to him for several years that working on global health disparities is his life's passion. As an undergraduate at at McGill University, he studied Microbiology & Immunology with a minor concentration in Social Studies of Medicine. During this time, he worked as a research assistant on two projects entitled 'Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease' published in the Annual Review of Anthropology and 'The Social Science of HIV/AIDS: A Critical Review and Priorities for Action' published by Canada's International Development Research Centre. His studies and extracurricular research led to an interest in global health equity and medical anthropology with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS. To further these interests, he undertook an M.Sc. at University College London in England. His thesis involved three months of field research examining HIV, ART adherence, and social change in Ghana, West Africa. Driven to gain a more hands-on/multi-disciplinary understanding of HIV, he worked with former President of the International AIDS society Dr. Mark Wainberg at the Lady Davis Institute in Montreal researching additive, inhibitive, and synergistic combinations of reverse transcriptase inhibitors in cell free assays.

His plans following medical school are to do a residency in internal medicine, a fellowship in infectious disease, and a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology.