Mayán Alvarado-Goldberg named Luce Scholar

Mayán Alvarado-Goldberg ’24 has been named a 2025-26 Luce Scholar and will spend the next year in Asia working in reproductive health.

Alvarado-Goldberg is one of a cohort of 16 who will embark on the 13-month experiential fellowship program, which offers immersive professional placements in Asia tailored to scholars’ interests.

Currently enrolled in the Master of Public Health program at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, Alvarado-Goldberg plans to apply to medical school and become an obstetrician-gynecologist. The Los Angeles native and Posse Scholar has known she wanted to work in reproductive health since high school, when she shadowed a complicated birth that was made even more complicated by a communication barrier, because the patient was from an Indigenous population in Central America.

“It was just scary. And I remember being like, this is what I want to do,” she said. “I want to be in these rooms so that I can find ways to help facilitate these really intense experiences.”

Having studied global health and neuroscience in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Alvarado-Goldberg is excited to learn more about how different healthcare systems work around the world. She was especially drawn to the Luce program’s language-learning emphasis — scholars begin with two months of intensive language instruction for the region where they have been placed. Alvarado-Goldberg, who grew up using English, Spanish and American Sign Language with her family, said she sees learning the language as “the first sign of respect” when entering a community.

She hopes to spend her time in Asia working in a clinical setting or birth clinic, where she can draw on her previous experiences, including her training as a labor and postpartum doula. In turn, embedding in a new community and gaining cultural knowledge and sensitivity can inform her future work as a physician. Alvarado-Goldberg plans to ultimately return to her hometown of Los Angeles, where she wants to treat patients who are part of the city’s large immigrant and diasporic populations.

“I owe it to [my future patients] to really invest myself in learning about their experiences and the histories of the places where they’re from and learning about what the diasporic experience is like,” she said.

She already dedicates much of her time to helping patients. For her MPH, she recently gained practical experience at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, where she created a digital referral system to help patients with continuing care and translated intake forms into Spanish. She is currently volunteering at a primary care clinic and is a Health Equity Scholar at Feinberg’s Center for Health Equity and Transformation, assisting with the center’s Chinatown Patient Navigation project.

Some of her most formative volunteer work, she said, has been as a medical advocate for Resilience, a rape crisis center in Chicago. In this role, she accompanies survivors of sexual violence in emergency departments to provide them emotional support during intake and examinations, as well as information and resources.

“Being in all these really high-crisis situations, normally it would make someone scared, but it makes me feel like I want to do this forever,” she said. “I want to be able to work with these people and really find a way to have a trauma-informed, empathetic lens in reproductive health.”