VP&S Equity and Justice Fellowship

Cameron Clarke, originally from Jersey City, NJ, is a first-year medical student at VP&S. As an undergraduate at Howard University, and later as a graduate student at the University of Oxford, Cameron worked in health education and health policy at the Baltimore City Health Department, Children's National Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, the United States House and Senate, and the DC Superintendent of Education, among others. At Columbia, Cameron serves on the University Senate, and helps coordinate Columbia’s chapters of White Coats for Black Lives, Primary Care Progress, Public Health Commute, and the Columbia VP&S Family Medicine Interest Group. In addition to his on-campus work, Cameron is a policy fellow at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he conducts health policy and equity research. As an Equity and Justice Fellow, he hopes to bring an anti-racist viewpoint to his work with Columbia.

Current Individual Projects: Designing and implementing a session on protecting the privacy and safety of undocumented patients and patients presenting in police or prison custody; collaborating with Public Health Commute on incorporating racial justice and health disparities education into the medical school curriculum

Spencer Dunleavy is a medical student in the VP&S class of 2023. Originally from Philadelphia, he attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he conducted research on treating children experiencing homelessness as well as fundraising for nonprofit organizations serving low-income children. After college, he completed masters degrees at the University of Oxford, where his work focused on how medical schools affect medical students’ attitudes toward those experiencing homelessness, evaluating medical school curricula toward addressing discrimination and microaggressions, and the role of comprehensive social services for people living with HIV/AIDS. At Columbia, he helped to lead the First Generation and Low Income Partnership (FLIP), served as Director of Analytics for VotER in order to bring voting access to patients around the country, mentors first-generation and low income pre-medical students at Harvard and Columbia, and co-leads the Public Health Commute. He will be applying to become a family medicine doctor with a plan to work in underserved communities as a primary care physician. 

Grace Pipes is a medical student in the VP&S class of 2023. She was raised in Templeton, California and attended Carleton College where she studied Geology. During undergraduate, she co-founded a student-led organization that trains students to serve as abortion doulas for a diverse patient population at two local abortion clinics in the Twin Cities, MN. Being an abortion doula led her to a career in medicine with a particular focus on reproductive justice. At Columbia, she helped lead Medical Students for Choice, American Medical Women’s Association, Association of Women Surgeons, and the harm reduction student-run free-clinic, Columbia Care Access Project. She also joined the Unmuted Series—the Intersection of Race, Reproductive Justice, and Family Planning—planning committee under the national Medical Students for Choice Organization, which is an ongoing series of webinars dedicated to exploring the history of reproductive violence and oppression facing the Black community and examining how this legacy of racism endures today along the entire reproductive healthcare spectrum. She will be applying to become an obstetrician/gynecologist with a plan to provide anti-racist family planning services in her future practice.