Alumni Awards
Family and friends of Young Alumni Award Winner Palav Babaria ’99: Nikki Andrews Gladding ’99, Jenna Kashmer Olds ’99, Palav Babaria ’99, parents Ashok and Usha Babaria, Sejal Babaria ’05, Mara Cutler Katsikis ’99, Natasha Mitra ’99.
Young Alumni Award The Young Alumni Award, established in 2005, is awarded to recent MFS graduates who have distinguished themselves through meritorious achievement or exceptional service to the community. Recipients of this award demonstrate commitment to the values and spirit of MFS after graduation by pursuing challenges and upholding the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. This year’s honoree is Palav Babaria ’99. “Palav’s academic career and medical practice embody the MFS goals of creating adults who have both tough minds and tender hearts,” said former Upper School Director Barbara Caldwell. “She is a young doctor devoted to not only caring for the underserved, in the U.S. and abroad, but to improving healthcare delivery systems for those populations.” Babaria’s passion for health has led her to work in South Africa, India, and Haiti. Her high level of research and writing has led to publication in outlets as influential as The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She earned her undergraduate degree in Southeast Asian Studies at Harvard University, where she studied London’s immigrant populations and participated in researching the experiences of Islamic high school students in the Boston area. At Yale Medical School, Babaria wrote a qualitative study of women’s gendered encounters in medical education, entitled I’m Too Used to It. Once published, her article achieved wide circulation and is currently part of the syllabus at University of Washington Medical School. She also spent time in South Africa as a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Research Fellow in conjunction with her medical school program.
FALL 2014
”I think the 12 years that I spent here gave me the vocabulary to reflect my politics and have a commitment to social justice that has persisted through all these years.” — Palav Babaria ’99 Babaria traveled to the University of California in San Francisco for her medical residency. She was admitted to a primary care specialization program, which only admits six students each year and is geared toward addressing the needs of underserved populations. Upon completion of her residency, she was awarded the Global Health-Hospital Medicine Fellowship, in which she worked as a hospitalist for six months in San Francisco and six months in rural Haiti. Babaria is currently running the human rights clinic at Oakland’s public hospital, and she continues to advocate for reform of America’s primary care systems. “People always ask me what inspires the work I do and what fuels my passion,” Babaria remarked at the awards dinner. “There are really two sources: my parents, who have always been loving and inspirational. The second is, truly, MFS.”
AMONG FRIENDS
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