Medha Palnati is a third-year medical student at Albany Medical College in Albany, NY, and a proud Siena College alum. The child of immigrants, she has long harbored a passion for advocacy and global health. Her first year at Siena, Medha became deeply involved with the San Damiano Refugee Partnership (SDRP) and Refugee and Immigrant Support Services Emaus (RISSE), where she served as a mentor, teacher, and family advocate to refugee students and families in the Albany area. Through these organizations, Medha met some of the most resilient, intelligent, and incredible human beings fighting uphill to achieve the futures they deserved. Recognizing her privilege in the face of her students’ struggles, Medha came to a holistic understanding of just how deeply global inequity can impact the trajectory of one’s life.
Through her studies in Biology and Political Science, Medha grew acutely obsessed with the often intentionally inequitable allocation of global resources and decided to dedicate her life to the service of others. In 2019, she served as a camp counselor at Double H Ranch, a serious fun camp for kids with chronic illness and disability. In 2020, she served as a volunteer at Annunciation House in El Paso, TX, providing refuge to women and children seeking asylum at the U.S. southern border. In 2021, she worked alongside Dr. Alexander Cardiel to provide healthcare to undocumented workers at the Saratoga racetrack. In 2022, she participated in the Documentary “The Pope Answers” to advocate for Pope Francis’s call for international protection of migrants by the Catholic church. And in 2023, she returned to the U.S. southern border to increase healthcare access for migrants alongside Dr. Brian Elmore at Hope Border Institute’s Clinica Hope, Sacred Heart Shelter, and Annunciation House.
During this time, Medha has remained involved in the lives of the family she’s made along the way. She has seen her students graduate from high school and college, witnessed families win asylum and gain citizenship to the United States, celebrated birthdays, rocked new babies to sleep, helped families through their first winters, immersed herself in homemade cooking from a variety of cultures, and soaked in the strong sense of community and support that those she has accompanied return to her.
As a medical student, Medha has used her voice to advocate for the expansion of Medicaid to those without documentation in the State of NY, created and run workshops to teach medical students, residents, and physicians across the country about the importance of Trauma-Informed care for their refugee and migrant patients, and had the honor to serve the Albany community as a healthcare clinician both in and out of the hospital. She does not yet know what field within healthcare she wants to pursue, but she hopes to follow in the footsteps of the leaders in global health who came before her to provide quality love and care to the impoverished.