The Honzel Fellowship in Health Care Ethics is awarded to an outstanding (rising) senior in the, with a passion for ethics as it relates to health care. The Fellow serves as a peer mentor to students in the Health Care Ethics Internship and develops an ethics project with particular relevance to students and alumni.
Sydney Shelby, 2024-25 Honzel Fellow
I am a senior with majors in Public Health Science and Biology and minors in African American studies and Medical and Health Humanities. My personal experiences have shown me the ways that health inequities disproportionately impact marginalized communities. These formative experiences have caused me to have a deep passion for implementing ethical and just practices into medicine. Ultimately, this interest in justice in healthcare is what drove me to pursue the Health Care Ethics Internship my junior year. My culminating project, “Lost in Translation: Ethics of Translation Services in Healthcare” allowed me to explore policy, the physician-patient relationship, and the use of AI in healthcare translation services. The project stemmed from my experience learning about some of the challenges the Deaf community encounters when engaging with medical institutions as I learned American Sign Language in high school. During my time as a Honzel Fellow, my research project will focus on health disparities within the Black community. Again, my personal experiences have fueled me with a unique passion to strive to contribute to the discourse surrounding the repair of the badly damaged relationship between the medical field and the Black community. Centering ethics, justice, and cultural competency and humility , will be key frameworks for dissecting how the medical field continues to evolve.
I can not overstate how invaluable my experience as a healthcare ethics intern was last year. It really opened my eyes to my passion for advocacy and justice in healthcare. I went into HCEI last year certain that I was on the path to becoming a physician. Though I certainly could still see that for myself, the program challenged me to imagine myself in fields that address health disparities on a more systemic level like health law or policy. Shadowing a physician also made me understand how difficult it can be to put the theory into practice. The day of a physician can be so fast paced. Yet, so many physicians, like the one I shadowed, still find a way to center the care and respect of their patient in their practice and actively implement bioethical principles. When this can occur, I was really able to see the profound impact that it has on the comfortability and care of not only the patient, but a community's relationship to medicine. Whatever I do in the future, I am hopeful that it will be engaged in making healthcare a more equitable and inclusive space like so many of the great healthcare professionals that I got to meet over my internship experience. I hope that as this year Honzel fellow I will be able to support interns in having experiences that were as fruitful and eye-opening as mine was for me.
Outside of being a Honzel Fellow, I also pursue my passion for community. I am a founding member and co-president of the Black Pre-Health Student Association, an organization targeted at supporting the next generation of Black healthcare professionals. I am also the current Associate Director of the Santa Clara Community Action Program (SCCAP),which is Santa Clara University’s chartered student organization for community service. Additionally I work in an undergraduate microbiology lab under Craig Stephens where we investigate antibiotic resistance in uropathogenic bacteria found in the SCU student community. I am a Health Peer Professionals Advisor, a member of the pre-health fraternity Delta Epsilon Mu, and work in Residence Life as a Neighborhood Representative. As a member of the University Honors Program and the Johnson Scholars program, I recognize the importance of academic commitment and service to my community.