For Roy Ahn, life is a joy—and sometimes a struggle.
The father of 1-year-old Charlie is blessed with a blossoming research career at the Division of Global Health and Human Rights in Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine. He’s in the same boat as many young Harvard researchers, handling the duties of a young family even as the pressures to perform professionally are soaring.
“We’re just constantly juggling our schedule and finances to make child care in Boston work,” said Ahn, an HMS instructor in surgery.
When he’s not shuttling Charlie to and from day care or playing tag-team parent with his wife, Ahn is working on several projects at Mass General, including work that seeks to understand how global health activities of nonprofit hospitals fit into their conception of providing community benefits, something the hospitals are required to do to retain their nonprofit status.
To the rescue of Ahn and others comes the Eleanor and Miles Shore 50th Anniversary Fellowship Program for Scholars in Medicine. The program is aimed at junior researchers in the “squeeze years” when young families and blossoming research careers both demand attention. Young physicians and scientists during these years often have to teach, conduct research, treat patients, publish research articles, write grant applications and care for their little children.
The program, established in 1996 to honor the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to HMS, provides fellows with between $25,000 and $50,000 for one or two years. The money is intended to be used to buy protected time to pursue a key activity, whether finishing a grant proposal, completing important research or concluding a manuscript. The money can be used, for example, to hire lab help that a fellow would otherwise not be able to afford. The program has 80 fellows this year.
—Adapted from a report in the Harvard Gazette
