The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship recently named five UC Berkeley School of Optometry students and one School of Public Health student as this year’s recipients.

Ka Yee So won for her proposal to employ a bilingual, telemedicine approach as a screening tool for ocular disease and as a platform for patient education geared specifically for residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Eric Larios and Angela Shahbazian won for their joint proposal to implement optometric services at three health centers in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

Michelle Wong and Shannon Lee won for their proposal to partner with Monument Crisis Center in Concord to provide vision screenings and to connect patients with resources for comprehensive eye exams and glasses.

Kevin’s Lee, a Master’s student in the School of Public Health, won for his proposal to work with Asian Health Services, an organization in Oakland that provides culturally and linguistically appropriate medical care to the underserved Asian immigrant community. Lee’s project seeks to partner with Asian Health Services to increase knowledge, and health care coverage specifically for young adults.

Now in its eighth year in the Bay Area, the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship has consistently chosen UC Berkeley health-focused graduate students to provide health care to the medically underserved. The fellowship is in honor of Albert Schweitzer, a medical doctor originally from Germany who devoted his life to caring for underserved populations in Gabon, Africa, in the early 20th century

Since 1940, the fellowship has selected nearly 2,500 graduate students to participate in the program, which awards fellows a $2,000 stipend to supplement the cost of providing healthcare to underserved populations through an existing organization. Since its extension to the Bay Area in 2007, the fellowship has selected 19 graduate students from Berkeley.