UB Scholarship Recipient Helps Those In Need

BUFFALO, N.Y. - UB senior Diana Pratt, who volunteered this summer to help deliver needed medical services to villagers in remote areas of the Himalayas, is the first recipient of the Mary Rosenblum Somit Scholarship.

Pratt, a Snyder resident, was in a group that recently returned from the 28-day trek to India led by Richard Lee, M.D., UB professor of medicine.

The award, made possible by an endowment established by Albert Somit, former UB executive vice president, provides Pratt with an $1,800 scholarship for the 1999-2000 academic year.

Somit, who served as the university's acting president in 1977, established the endowment to "honor his mother, who, like so many others of her generation, left family, friends and all that was familiar in Poland to seek a better life in the U.S. for themselves and their future children."

Somit initiated the scholarship fund through a $75,000 bequest commitment to benefit "hard-working and deserving undergraduate students" in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Deciding he wanted to see immediate results, Somit has given additional gifts so he could activate the fund and meet students like Pratt, whose qualifications pleased him. "She was precisely the sort of student I had in mind," he added.

Pratt noted that although her often exhausting, demanding journey was marked with high altitudes, precarious trails and multiple cultural and medical challenges from the villagers, it gave her newfound "wisdom and appreciation for both cultural and medical diversity."

She will graduate from UB in May with a bachelor's degree in special studies, combining her interests in medicine and anthropology. Pratt wants to pursue a medical career. While at UB, Pratt has been a volunteer tutor with UB's Thomas J. Edwards Learning Center and has worked for the past three years in the Office of Disability Services.

For information on how you can support the University at Buffalo, go to http://www.buffalo.edu/giving.