After seeing her mom fall into a diabetic coma twice and struggle against racial, gender and socioeconomic barriers while seeking health care in France, Maisha Akbar, M.S., was drawn to the field of medicine to effect change.

Studying science helped her feel a sense of control and better understand her mother’s illness, Akbar said, and after leaving Paris at 19, she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology from UF and a master’s degree in biomedical sciences from the University of South Florida before applying to the UF College of Medicine for her medical degree.

Now starting medical school with a daughter of her own, Akbar said she hopes to improve patients’ lives and inspire her child to study hard and follow her dreams by creating a more equitable and empathetic health care field.

“I spent a lot of my teenage years watching my mom go through diabetes,” Akbar said. “As an immigrant Black woman, she was often treated differently, and I got to see the role biases can play in health care. I realized how essential it was to have more humane care, a little more patience and cultural competency. When providers demonstrated this, it made such a huge difference in her outcomes that it inspired me to contribute myself. Helping to create a more equitable, more diverse and more just field — I feel like that’s where I can directly make a change.” — DI

After two deployments, a lot of time submerged underwater and 12 years away from his home state, first-year medical student Taylor Calibo returned to Florida to begin his career in medicine.

He always had an innate love for STEM and critical thinking, earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering and serving as a submarine lieutenant in the U.S. Navy before applying to medical school. He was trained as a nuclear engineer first, operating the submarine’s nuclear propulsion plant. Then he moved to the forward end of the boat as the officer in charge of diving and surfacing the ship.

Calibo’s health care calling didn’t come until a life-threatening illness impacted his lungs. Those who saved him inspired him to apply his passion for critical thinking to directly help those in need.

“On my first Western-Pacific deployment, I had volunteered for Navy dive school and had developed a respiratory illness while in high-risk training,” Calibo said. “A few weeks later, while at sea, my illness progressed to severe pneumonia followed by symptoms of shock and respiratory failure. If it wasn’t for the heroic actions of my crew, who made a concerted effort to save my life, I wouldn’t be here today. A two-week stay in an ICU in Okinawa and my subsequent recovery time allowed me to complete a second submarine deployment. Over the next couple of years, I began contemplating going to medical school. My respect for those who had cared for me, combined with a passion for serving others and a love of the science and medicine responsible for saving my life, helped guide me toward a career in medicine to use my experience to be with others in times of crisis.” — EB

Tran Ngo, a first-year student in the college’s MD-PhD Training Program, became interested in medicine due to her own medical anomaly, a congenital dermoid in her right eye. As a child, her eye initiated many questions from her peers, which became a source of curiosity and motivated her to pursue medicine.

Ngo, who is originally from Vietnam but moved with her family to Tampa at age 11, studied biomedical engineering during her undergraduate days at UF. The first-generation college graduate has long had her heart set on becoming a physician, but she was also drawn to the idea of designing the biomedical technology used in clinics. During her undergraduate studies, she worked on biomaterial research, which inspired her to pursue postbaccalaureate research training at the National Institutes of Health.

She spent the past two years with the NIH, working on understanding the immune response to biomaterial implants. Ngo also contributed to establishing and analyzing the first representative national serosurvey of SARS-CoV-2 that identified 17 million undiagnosed cases of COVID-19 as of summer 2020 in the U.S. Upon returning to UF to begin her journey to becoming a physician-scientist, Ngo is looking forward to contributing to clinical research and helping others.

“This is the place where I learned, discovered and nurtured my goal to be a physician-scientist,” she said. “I’m excited to bring back what I learned at the NIH and continue to explore and expand my passions here at UF. Over the next eight years, I want to combine all my interests to develop a research project involving medicine, science and engineering. I also want to become involved in the community, understand health disparities better and find ways to make biomedical technology more accessible to patients in need.” — EM

Benjamin Cipion, M.S. ’18, is a husband, father and respiratory therapist who cared for ICU patients in Tampa during the peak of the pandemic. He now joins UF’s M.D. class of 2026 to continue fostering his love for medicine.

With a master’s degree in microbiology and cell science and a concentration in medical microbiology and biochemistry from UF, Cipion leveraged his background to help train nurses, therapists and medical assistants on proper isolation techniques, advocated for the health care profession and saw behind-the-scenes hospital protocols. Now, he is excited to learn how to advocate in a more expansive role at the UF College of Medicine.

For Cipion, medicine has always been an inexplicable attraction. He compared it to having a favorite color — there is not an explicit reason behind the attraction, it’s just there.

“I think my journey took some time to mature and materialize,” he said. “Sometimes others see the potential in you before you see it in yourself. I think others had to flesh out that idea for me because it was always there, but it felt so out of reach sometimes. My children are that extra oomph that sometimes you need, and they inspire me. You remember the innocence it feels like the world is losing sometimes. The idea of being hopeful, believing in things — when you see that in your children, you get reinvigorated, you get reinspired, and it makes you want to be a better person every day for them because they look up to you.” — EB