College senior leads efforts at local school

While most aspiring humanitarians think globally and act locally, College senior Mei Elansary's achievements have been much more far-reaching.

A pioneer of a health education program at Sayre Middle School run in conjunction with the University, she has made contributions that range from convincing local kids to stop smoking to bringing scientists one step closer to a cure for tuberculosis.

On the West Philadelphia front, she is working to lift the Sayre Middle School community -- which has long been plagued by dramatic health problems -- back onto its feet.

Elansary is playing an indispensible role in getting the Sayre Health Promotion and Disease Prevention project -- a collaborative effort through which Penn's resources are being tapped in order to meet the health needs of the Sayre community -- off the ground.

Her work with the project began two summers ago after she participated in a seminar hosted by the Center for Community Partnerships Penn Program for Public Service Internship.

"Mei is a student who picked up on" the work which began there "and has really taken it to a whole new level," Associate Director of the CCP Cory Bowman said.

Elansary was a driving force two summers ago in research surrounding the urban health problems in West Philadelphia and decided to help come up with a solution.

Her self-described mission is "to empower adolescents to become advocates of health for themselves and their community."

Lofty goals are not foreign to Penn students. But rarely do any achieve the magnitude of success with the degree of finesse which Elansary's colleagues say she has displayed.

To start, she identified "mutually beneficial partnerships with Penn" -- discovering one with the School of Design, Bowman said.

When one of the Sayre teachers Elansary worked with during her CCP internship complained of a lack of art education for her students, she established a partnership between Fine Arts Professor Sumi Maeshima and the Sayre community. It turned into an academically based community service course through which Sayre students expressed their "viewpoints on health and what it means to them" and worked with Penn Design students to design a mural that now hangs on the wall at Sayre Middle School.

"Mei is always looking at every single resource and every single partnership and finding out how they can work together, how Penn students in all disciplines can learn by improving the quality of life in West Philadelphia," Bowman said.

Elansary's next step was to convince Janet Tighe -- a professor of History and Sociology of Science -- to jump onboard for another service learning course.

"It takes a special student like Mei to convince a faculty member in August to offer a course in September," Bowman added.

But like most everything else Elansary has set her mind to, she did it.

The course and the project's success naturally hinged on Elansary's continued presence in Philadelphia and at Sayre.

So she canceled her plans to study abroad in the fall of 2002.

"You start teaching them about health, and you empower them, and they really pick up on that," she said.

Elansary said her work in service-based courses and at Sayre has transformed her education and future plans.

After working with the students for a year, they say, "I really want you to come back, and I really want to go to Penn when I grow up, and you need to tell me how," Elansary said.

She explained that lessons she has taught them seem to stick -- for instance, after a discussion about the dangers of smoking, the students came to her saying that they wanted to stop.

They also rely on her constant presence.

"When you don't come in one day, they say, 'Where the hell were you?' They expect you there every week. It's amazing to watch their minds open up," Elansary said.

And while Elansary has opened the minds of Philadelphia adolescents, she's also caught the eyes of several national organizations.

Last July, she was presented with the 2003 Campus Compact Howard R. Swearer Humanitarian Award for outstanding public service and spoke at the ceremony.

Additionally, Elansary was awarded a grant by the College Alumni Society and spent this past summer researching "antibiotic resistance acquisition by tuberculosis" at the Pasteur Institute in France where she made a breakthrough discovery.

Elansary discovered a way to "solubilize the protein" in tuberculosis -- a former stumbling block on the road to a cure for TB. With the advance, scientists are now able to study the structure of the protein, making them one step closer to "addressing multi-drug resistant TB which is a particular problem in developing countries," she said.

Moreover, she is one of four students who have been invited to speak at the Wingspread Conference -- sponsored in part by the Johnson Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation -- on public policy, public work and public understanding.

And that's just the beginning.

After graduating this spring, Elansary plans to conduct "research on child and adolescent health programs in Cairo, applying my work in the West Philadelphia community to a global context," she wrote in an e-mail statement.

"I plan on pursuing a career in public health and addressing childhood health disparities in urban areas."

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