In a remote Guyanese village, a young woman with large brown eyes asked Vandana Sharma, “What is AIDS?”

Sharma had traveled there in 2001 with Youth Challenge International to assess the village’s health needs and resources. “My somewhat naïve ideas about the state of global health were shattered when I discovered that many of the women had heard only vague rumors that AIDS is something bad,” Sharma says.

When she returned to Canada, Sharma approached her medical studies with a broadened concept of health that encompassed poverty, culture, social factors and the environment. Her elective work in developing countries—especially in an Ethiopian hospital for latestage AIDS and TB patients—reflected Sharma’s growing interest in global health disparities.

“I saw room after room packed with dying patients, their emaciated bodies ravaged by uncontrolled disease. How could we have let this happen?” she asked herself. In search of a solution, Sharma postponed

her medical residency to study international public health.