Home / Tulane medical student named Emerging Leader in Biosecurity fellow
Aleksander Stoller was named to a highly-competitive fellowship that combines his first career in foreign policy and his second career in medicine. (Photo by Cheryl Gerber)
Aleksandar Stoller spent 10 years working in foreign policy before coming to Tulane University School of Medicine. Now in his third year of medical school, Stoller received a fellowship that combines his former career with his new one. The Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity (ELBI) Fellowship from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health is a highly competitive, part-time program designed to develop the next generation of biosecurity leaders and innovators.
The fellowship brings together people who look at biosecurity from a policy perspective, clinicians who would have to deal with the response on the ground, and even attorneys to understand how agreements are made at the national and international levels. The fellows attend in-person workshops where they learn how to solve problems, and networking events where they build connections.
“The people doing the research and the people developing policies don’t always talk, and this fellowship gives us a better perspective of everyone involved in the process,” said Stoller. “When we all understand the process, things can move more efficiently should there be another pandemic or other emergency in the future.”
Stoller has already completed the first workshop in Washington, D.C., and will head back for an extended session this summer. In the fall, Stoller will get to travel to the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and learn more about the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty.
Stoller hopes to pursue a career in emergency medicine once he graduates from Tulane School of Medicine and one day put all his training into action.
Stoller went on to add, “I’d like to pursue a disaster medicine fellowship to understand better government processes and determine more efficient means to help clinicians on a local and global scale during times of crisis, whether through policy, research, or working with device manufacturers.”