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Meet Sangki Oak, MMPH candidate

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SANGKI (pronounced SONG-key) OAK (MMPH ’19) is a fourth year medical student who is taking a year off to pursue his MPH. Oak graduated from Duke University “eons ago” with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science and worked for awhile in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom and bust.

After September 11, 2001, though, he decided to join the military and served as a navy corpsman (medic) with the Marines for nearly eight years. It was during his service in the military, particularly while providing care to the Afghan locals during his two deployments, that he developed a passion for medicine and a desire to provide health care to low-resource populations overseas. During this time, Oak also was able to observe the needs, challenges, and pitfalls of public health efforts in those environments. This passion was further reinforced when he had the opportunity to provide medical assistance in Nepal after the earthquake in 2015 and while conducting research at a public hospital in Guatemala City in 2016.

Oak’s overall goal is to help provide long-term changes in the health of communities in low-resource countries overseas while delivering medical care as a physician. He plans to specialize in trauma surgery (though he expects to practice all areas of medicine overseas) and so hopes to focus on global surgery during his public health studies. Given his background in war-torn regions, Oak is interested in serving in conflict areas and hopes to affect change in those communities through well-planned public health initiatives while providing needed medical services.



1/30/2017

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