To honor the legacy of the late Commonwealth Fund president Margaret E. Mahoney, The Commonwealth Fund, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the New York Academy of Medicine, and other founding donors have created a new fellowship program for health professional students, focused on transforming health care delivery systems for vulnerable populations and early childhood development and prevention.

The Margaret E. Mahoney Fellowships will provide stipends to support medical, dental, nursing, public health, and public policy students to participate in eight- to 10-week research and policy projects focused on addressing the health needs of vulnerable urban populations. Projects must be conducted with or supervised by a senior professional mentor in an academic, government, or nonprofit institution in the Greater New York/New Jersey area.

For more information, or to apply to the fellowship, please visit: http://www.nyam.org/grants/mahoney.html.

The inaugural awardees are:

• Vikaskumar Patel, D.D.S. candidate, New York University (NYU), whose project will explore linkages between NYU Dental School and federally qualified health centers; 
• Aakash Shah, M.D./M.P.H. candidate, Harvard University, who will work on health care reform efforts in New Jersey at the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University; 
• Bronwyn Fleming-Jones, M.S.N. candidate, Yale University, who will seek to improve awareness, prevention, and programming around obesity and diabetes at the South Bronx Center for Children and Families; 
• Martin Casey, M.D. candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, who will examine socioeconomic and geographical obstacles to seeking cancer surgical care at high-volume centers such as Mt. Sinai; and 
• Jason Lin, D.D.S. candidate, Columbia University College of Dental Medicine, who will look at the potential of student-run dental programs to provide quality care and outcomes as well as impact trainee choice to serve vulnerable and underserved populations.