Meet 2025 Award Recipient
Cecilia Katzenstein
Cecilia came to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from the University of Chicago, where she was a Clinical Excellence Scholar and Health Policy Scholar and majored in History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine with a minor in Human Rights. She was a Pozen Center for Human Rights fellow and wrote her honors BA thesis on scientific racism in Yellow Fever immunity theories in nineteenth century New Orleans, which won multiple awards.
She entered the MD/MPH program in 2021 as a Global Health Scholar, receiving a fully funded MPH. She has participated in the East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership, the ISMMS student-run free clinic (EHHOP) as an Access to Care Team Case Manager and Teaching Senior, in the admissions department as an Admissions Champion, and as a machine perfusion monitor for the liver transplant department. During her time at Sinai, she has also contributed to research with the Mount Sinai Human Rights Program and the Ethics Committee, and has worked on a multitude of projects related to gastroenterology, maternal health, and health equity. She is currently on a scholarly year funded by the Digestive Disease Research Fellowship focusing on hepatology research, and has both published in peer review journals and presented her work at national and international conferences this year. She was elected into the Gold Humanism Honor Society in 2024.
Cecilia is incredibly grateful for her many mentors and classmates at Sinai who have shown her immense support and modeled a humanistic approach to medicine. She would also like to express her immense gratitude for her family and friends for always reminding her why she wanted to be a physician in the first place. Cecilia will graduate in 2026 and pursue internal medicine residency.