Brian Liang

UConn School of Medicine, 2021

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Bethany, Connecticut. I hold a Bachelor’s of Science in Molecular Cell Biology and Sociology. In college, during spring 2015, I volunteered on an Alternative Break Trip to Philadelphia focused on mitigating healthcare inequalities.  In winter 2016, I went on another Alternative Break Trip, this time to Birmingham, Alabama, focused on civil rights and poverty. As a trip director, I led an Alternative Break Trip in fall and spring of 2017 to New York City focused on advocacy for people with HIV/AIDS. In Connecticut, I volunteered at UCHC and Yale New Haven Hospital for sixty hours in spring 2016.

The Urban Service Track is a necessary supplement to my medical school education in order to be a healthcare provider to underserved populations. The UST will put me into contact both with the communities I will serve and with healthcare professionals from other disciplines I will have to work with. Through these contacts, I will be able to help these communities begin to reverse the effects of decades of discrimination. The UST will help me enact the expansion of the role of primary care doctors, so that in the future primary care doctors will take an active role in countering social factors facilitating disease induction as both community physicians and community allies. I expect the UST will help me transform the US healthcare system from one focused primarily on diseases and cures to a system that also focuses on social inequality and disease prevention.