Meet 2022 Award Recipient
Michelle Tong
Michelle came to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she majored in Biomedical Engineering and minored in Asian American Studies. Before attending Icahn, Michelle completed a master’s degree and worked at the Bayview Foundation as a pre-college and career counselor. She entered the MD program in 2018 as part of the Primary Care Scholars Program.
While at Icahn, Michelle co-founded The Apothecary, a creative arts magazine, with her classmate Lilly Taing. Under the mentorship of Dr. Jacob Appel, she created and taught a Nexus course on poetry, titled Metaphor in Medicine, for three consecutive years. Michelle was an active participant and course coordinator for the Words To Live By writing workshop, where one of her poems won first prize in the national Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award and was published in JAMA. She has also volunteered as a mentor for the LGBTQIA+ Young Queer Urban Teens for Healthcare (YQUTH) Pipeline Program, served as a member of the Health Equity Taskforce on Segregated Care, and practiced as a senior clinician for the East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership (EHHOP) Mental Health Clinic. During her scholarly year with the Office of Well-Being and Resilience, Michelle contributed to research on burnout and racism-related distress in healthcare workers. This year she was elected to the Gold Humanism Honor Society.
Michelle would like to thank her partner, family, friends, and countless faculty mentors and staff for their unconditional love, support, and wisdom.
Michelle will graduate with her MD degree in 2023.