Senior Wins Fulbright Award

Mayukha Dyta '24 of Powell, Ohio, earned a highly competitive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program grant to spend nine months in India studying the country's medical diagnostic and treatment delivery methods in urban versus rural areas.

Her Fulbright-Nehru Student Research grant will support her research at Goa Medical College and Hospital in Goa, India, where she already has completed two summer research projects with grant support from OWU's signature program, the OWU Connection.

Each of Dyta's OWU Connection projects—"Teaching Medical Diversity: How Indian Medical Schools Prepare Their Students for Diverse Patient Population" and "Books to Pills: How Medical Education is Translated to Treatment in Indian Medical Systems"— laid the foundation for her successful Fulbright application.

"So far, I have researched how the Indian medical education system teaches their students how to become doctors, and in what ways these students engage in medicine throughout their time as a student," says Dyta, who majored in pre-medicine and sociology/anthropology.

"The Fulbright will be a continuation of this process," she says, "and will focus more on how these students learn different diagnostic methods, and how their learned processes of treatment are molded by the patient and area they are treating in, whether that be urban or rural areas."

At OWU, she also worked as a research intern and volunteer at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus and at Mount Carmel St. Ann's in Westerville.

After completing her Fulbright experience, Dyta plans to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. in medical anthropology.

She says her OWU experience and the Fulbright grant are "the beginning of a lifelong commitment to creating medical spaces full of diversity, mutual communication, and understanding in all shades of medicine."

Alumni gifts to The Ohio Wesleyan Fund support OWU Connection experiences for students through research, internship, and service opportunities.