Summary

Sky Vanderburg completed the Duke Global Health Internal Medicine Pathway in 2019. He is currently continuing his training with a Pulmonary fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. Sky is no stranger to the valuable opportunities offered through DGHI and the Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health. As a medical student at Duke, he spent a year as a Fogarty Global Health Fellow with the KCMC-Duke Collaboration in Moshi, Tanzania, working to strengthen a regional cancer registry and raise awareness of the systemic underreporting of cancer cases in low and middle income countries. He then went on to study decision analysis, epidemiology, and biostatistics during his MPH work at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Vanderburg’s clinical work in residency led to a deep appreciation for the burden of respiratory illness, especially in light of global challenges posed by respiratory infections (i.e. influenza and tuberculosis), air pollution, and tobacco. As a Global Health Fellow with the Ruhuna-Duke Partnership in Galle, Sri Lanka, his research looked at ways to better characterize the epidemiology of severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) in tropical climates and explore the role of host-based diagnostics in reducing unnecessary antimicrobial use under the mentorship of Dr. Gayani Tillekeratne, Dr. Christopher Woods, and Dr. Muhunthan Sellathurai.