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Giannina L. Garces-Ambrossi

Biography

Giannina Garces Ambrossi, 20, long wanted to be a doctor but it was her mother's experience with breast cancer that confirmed this career goal. After her mother's mastectomy, Giannina gently cleaned the wounds, telling her mother funny stories. It made her more determined than ever to become a physician and treat other Hispanic women. Giannina, classified as exceptionally gifted, skipped high school entirely. Instead, she enrolled in a special program at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA, where she earned a 3.92 GPA and graduated with distinction. Ms. Garces Ambrossi will attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for a combined M.D. and master of public health degree.

Giannina Garces Ambrossi credits her remarkable academic achievements to her Italian-Ecuadorian mother's love of learning and her half-Incan father's dedication to hard work. Drawing on such inspiration, she says, allowed her to enter college after 8th grade. Having been invited by Mary Baldwin College into a special program for exceptionally gifted pupils, Giannina then proved by her strong GPA and election into Phi Beta Kappa that she was well prepared for this step. At 18, she graduated with distinction.

Ms. Garces Ambrossi understood her passion for a medical career from the time she gave loving care to her mother following a mastectomy. "I have an instinctive desire to be a physician - learning basic science and working with health care have shown me how medicine connects scientific inquiry with human interaction and community development," she writes. "I want to ensure that preventive medicine will reach women like my mother, and I want to care for them at a level higher than I could care for my mother - I want to treat them."

She has begun preparing for that career by serving as a Spanish-language translator at the University of Virginia hospital and in clinics sponsored by the Rural Health Outreach Program, and working as a research assistant at Georgetown University to interview patients about such issues as their awareness of cancer prevention and treatment. She also helped write a grant to begin a training program for "navigators" to guide Hispanic cancer patients in the Washington, DC area.

Getting to where she is now has been tough, though. Her mother's illness and a family financial crisis came just as she was about to start college. But she applied for, and received, a Gates Millennium Scholarship that saved the day. "My joy in beginning the family's first college degree immersed me in every activity and class," she recalls. While completing a biomedical research internship at the National Institutes of Health, she developed her own research project in her senior year and found her career interest affirmed. She remembers, "I realized there are myriad ways to improve someone's life, and so many lives to improve."

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