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Marissa Courey

Biography

Graduate Scholarship Biography (prepared September 2005):  First named a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar in 2003 through the Undergraduate Scholarship Program, Marissa Courey moved around the US and the world with the demands of her mother's career as a public health nurse. Her father had died when she was an infant. At one point, the moves brought Marissa and her mother from the city of Philadelphia to a Navajo Reservation. It took most of her stay as a child on the reservation for Marissa to realize that changes could be opportunities to learn and grow and not just angry separations from friends or routines.

Marissa would have no shortage of such opportunities. She went to high school in Cairo, Egypt, where she learned Arabic and became actively involved in public service and even research. She organized meals for children in cancer wards during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, taught technology to young women near the Libyan border so they could sell their crafts on the Internet, and worked as a lab assistant at a US Naval Medical Research Unit in Egypt.

Then, "armed with too many pairs of sandals and not nearly enough sweaters," Marissa came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she quickly became a campus leader. On the way to earning her bachelor's degree, she headed to Kenya for a semester of field study and hard lessons in the complexities of development.

Such lessons helped Marissa choose a career as a health economist. She is convinced economics and public health must inform each other. The challenge, she says, "is to convince policy makers of the value of investing in disease prevention, health promotion, and economic development." This is an emerging field that Marissa wants to promote so that "some day a routine public health team will include a health economist."

Undergraduate Scholarship Biography (prepared May 2003):  Marissa Courey's decision to pursue economics and public health came about from living on a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and her last two high school years in Cairo, Egypt. She accompanied her mother, who was on assignment. Marissa wrote: "In spite of quality, no-cost health care, Navajo indicators remain very poor, because of poverty, poor nutrition, and social problems such as alcoholism, unemployment, and inadequate education and training systems. This points to the relationship between economic development and health." In Egypt, she also saw "ravaging poverty with disastrous health implications."

Marissa is working to achieve fluency in Arabic with the goal of returning to the Middle East to use her knowledge to create a "bridge" among all parties.

Marissa has already built bridges of understanding on campus. She is the founding president/dialogue leader of the Global Awareness Society, which fosters discussion of such issues as the Arab-Israeli conflict, globalization, and energy alternatives. She represented UNICEF at the Model U.N. in the Hague.

As an intern, Marissa worked for the student government on the University's diversity initiatives, including the development of a curriculum for diversity trainings. For the medical school, she researched the inclusion of women in clinical trials. She is serving as a justice on the Student Judiciary and was just elected vice election commissioner.

None of this activity has held her back academically. Marissa is on the dean's list and has been recognized for excellence in forensic science.

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