From Malverne to Mauritius, Fulbright scholar hopes to help

A Malverne resident from Guyana with her sights set on using medicine to recognize and help domestic violence victims will spend the next year doing so overseas as a Fulbright scholar.

Sarah Sadik, a 2019 graduate of SUNY Old Westbury, was awarded the Fulbright May 2, a first for the university. She will spend the 2022-23 academic year conducting research in Mauritius, an island nation off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It has a population of just over 1.3 million and is roughly the size of Rhode Island. 

As part of her research through interviews, surveys and the study of Mauritian culture, Sadik will look at how the country's health system screens patients in clinical settings for signs of domestic violence. Data from the study will be used to help medical professionals better recognize signs of domestic violence in order to possibly intervene, Sadik said.

Born in Guyana, Sadik, 23, said she found that Mauritius shared similarities with her native country, such as the way both have economies once based partly on sugar cane farming. She also noticed similarities in how people in both countries interacted at the grassroots level with those helping physicians provide health care.

“Community centers are a place where you interact the most when it comes to patient interactions, especially when it comes to older people,” she said. “I feel that’s really a crucial place where a physician can help … identify factors like what kinds of questions are you asking the patient about their life, about their home life, because domestic violence affects people health-wise in a plethora of ways.”

A biological sciences major at Old Westbury, Sadik is now a clinical research coordinator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's thoracic surgery department in Manhattan.

She said the Fulbright application process, and waiting to hear back, took a year and a half — first being named a finalist, then an alternate, and finally, the scholarship recipient.

Sadik is a student who “embodied the Old Westbury mission of 'building a more just' world," said SUNY Old Westbury President Timothy E. Sams in a statement, "and we're excited to see her excellence, and that of her education, be recognized in this way.”

Created in 1946, the Fulbright offers international educational and cultural exchange programs to students, scholars, artists, teachers, and professionals of all backgrounds, according to the U.S. State Department website. In the country of their choice, Fulbright scholars study, teach, or pursue research and professional projects. Alumni of the program, which is open to people from around the world, have included heads of government or state and Pulitzer Prize winners.

The research Sadik will do in Mauritius will be an extension of how she hopes to help others, said Manya Mascareno, chair of biological sciences and director of the Institute of Cancer Research and Education at SUNY Old Westbury.

“With this Fulbright scholarship, she is extending her scientific basis to understand at the psychological level, at the treatment level, what domestic violence women go through,” she said.

Sadik, who has a 21-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister, would accompany her grandmother, who suffered from chronic conditions including diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney failure, to doctor’s appointments to help translate. Her grandmother's health has since improved, Sadik said.

“Seeing a lot of great physicians work with her, and really connect with her, even though they didn’t have that cultural understanding is really something that inspired me to pursue medicine,” Sadik said.

Sadik would go on to graduate from Bayside High School in Queens in 2015 — in three years — and attend SUNY Old Westbury. Her family later moved to Malverne. She majored in biological sciences because of the “fulfillment that I get of thinking about something and then being able to form different steps to come to an answer or an understanding.”

Upon finishing her Fulbright work, which takes about a year, Sadik hopes to attend medical school and focus on community health and preventive medicine, while looking at vulnerable populations.