Reducing the Burden of Cancer Through Research, Education, and Collaboration
By Tim Dean on the Fall 2017 edition of Dartmouth Medicine:
One day back in 2011, while riding in a truck on a hot, dusty road in rural Honduras, Linda Kennedy, MEd, associate director of community affairs at Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center, turned to colleague Greg Tsongalis, PhD, who'd been unusually quiet, and asked, "So, have you come up with a scientific question yet?"
The two were in Honduras to investigate the country's high cancer rates and find out what kinds of research projects could be done to help lessen that burden.
"I'd been kind of deep in thought—there were so many questions, I wasn't sure where to begin," recalls Tsongalis, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine. "I mean, we rarely see individuals who have not taken so much as an aspirin in their lifetime!"
This wasn't Kennedy's first trip to Central America. For a number of years, while working for Dartmouth College, she'd been helping to lead community-building activities in the mountain village of El Rosario through ACTS (Americans Caring Teaching Sharing) Honduras—a non-profit based in Norwich, VT, which works to foster cross-cultural understanding and promote sustainable programs for health, education, agriculture, and economic development...