Alumni
Emily Zern
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At Vanderbilt, Emily has focused her volunteer work on underserved populations, both abroad and in the Nashville Community. In the first and second years of her Vanderbilt career, she served as the Public Relations Chair and President, respectively, of Face AIDS, a group whose mission is to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS and raise money for those afflicted. Through Face AIDS, Emily has volunteered at Nashville CARES and has helped to organize the annual World AIDS Day Benefit, raising over $12,000 in the past two years for Partners in Health and NACOA, an HIV-positive women's coalition in Kampala, Uganda. In May 2008, Emily participated in a one-month service project in Uganda as part of the Kampala Project. She volunteered at the Naguru Health Clinic in the prenatal HIV diagnostic laboratory and general infectious diseases testing center.
Emily also serves on the executive board of the Inter-American Health Alliance, an advocacy organization for Guatemalan health care that also raises money for Primeros Pasos clinic in Guatemala. In March 2009, Emily participated in the Manna Project International Spring Break service trip to La Ceiba, Honduras, where she and a group of fifteen students volunteered at the Hogar de Amor Children's Home. At the end of her sophomore year, Emily co-founded Vanderbilt ONE, a campus branch of the international grassroots campaign to combat extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Within the Nashville community, Emily volunteers weekly at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt and at a Catholic Charities' refugee center, where she teaches mathematics and English to middle-school-aged refugee children. She also teaches bi-weekly science lessons to elementary students in Nashville public schools through Vanderbilt Student Volunteers for Science.
Following her undergraduate career at Vanderbilt, Emily plans to attend medical school and pursue a career in medicine and global health.