The room reeked of sweat and death.

The smell is what Autumn Martin remembers about meeting Enoch. She was a college student on a medical mission trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. Enoch was 20 and dying of liver cancer because he had no access to medical care.

Over the next five years, Martin saw Enoch’s personal struggle played out again and again—from her volunteer work in Baltimore and West Philadelphia health clinics, to medical service trips to Latin America. “Across an imaginary line, I would return home to a world of wealth, privilege, insurance and health,” she says.

In the future, Martin hopes to do her part to erase that line at the individual and community levels by combining a family medicine practice with health policy work to improve access to health care. “Public health and medicine are both necessary to make lasting changes in the health of a community,” Martin says.