Lauren Rosenberg ’22 has spent her life living between Fort Lauderdale and Soldotna, Alaska, a rural fishing town of 5,000, where emergency care often begins with medevac insurance and a flight to Anchorage.
Now in her final undergraduate semester at Duke University and recently selected for the Beta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in the State of North Carolina, Lauren is completing her studies in sociology and pursuing a Master of Global Health and preparing to spend May to July in Tanzania working to design a peer-support and debriefing framework for frontline maternal, pediatric and neonatal healthcare workers.
The throughline between Alaska and Tanzania may not seem obvious. For Lauren, it is.
Growing up between two vastly different healthcare systems, one rich in specialists and advanced resources, the other shaped by climate, distance and scarcity, sparked her interest in understanding how systems work and how they can function better.
"In Soldotna, where our family runs a salmon fishing lodge, we're 17 miles from town," Lauren said. "If something serious happens, a helicopter comes.”
Experiencing that reality alongside life in South Florida gave her an early, personal understanding of healthcare access and inequity. In Fort Lauderdale, advanced care is often minutes away. In rural Alaska, geography changes everything. That contrast stayed with her and ultimately shaped her academic path.
At Pine Crest, Lauren was a member of the three-year Science Research Program, where she conducted research focused on the COVID-19 vaccine and neutralizing antibody development in older adults. The experience was formative.
“It gave me the confidence to seek out research opportunities,” she said. “And it taught me how to communicate with people from different academic backgrounds and advocate for my ideas.”
That confidence followed her to Duke, where she immersed herself in global health research. Duke’s extensive international partnerships, including collaborations in Tanzania and Brazil, opened new doors. Lauren began working with a research team focused on maternal, pediatric and neonatal health outcomes in Tanzania, where rates of maternal and child mortality remain significantly elevated.
This summer, she will spend May to July in Tanzania continuing that work.
Her project builds on prior focus groups with frontline emergency, pediatric and maternal healthcare workers who identified systemic barriers to delivering care. One challenge that emerged: the absence of structured debriefing systems following traumatic or high-stress medical events.
“In the United States, after a major emergency or patient death, providers often participate in structured debriefing sessions,” Lauren said. “They talk about what went well, what could improve and how they’re feeling. But in Tanzania, staffing shortages and resource constraints often mean those sessions don’t happen, or the tools simply weren’t designed for that context.”
Lauren and her Duke Global Health Institute mentor will facilitate a co-design workshop with local Tanzanian healthcare workers at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi to develop a peer-support and debriefing framework to reduce burnout, compassion fatigue, attrition and psychological trauma risk in healthcare workers. The goal is to pilot and refine the framework over the next year, with the research ultimately informing her master’s thesis and contributing to a published intervention model that can be implemented in other Low- and Middle-income Countries.
What has surprised her most, she says, is the enthusiasm for collaboration across borders.
“I’ve been really inspired by how open people are to global partnerships,” Lauren said. “Even with time differences and resource challenges, people go out of their way to build these research communities.”
That spirit of collaboration reflects the global lens she developed long ago, first by living between Alaska and Florida, and later by studying systems of health and equity in the classroom and the field.
After completing her master’s degree next year, Lauren plans to attend medical school. Her long-term goal is clear: to practice medicine while continuing to engage in global health systems work.
Looking back, Lauren sees her unconventional upbringing as something that has prepared her for a future in global medicine. Living between two very different worlds has become Lauren’s greatest strength, shaping how she thinks, how she asks questions and how she hopes to serve patients around the world.