Events

Dr. Munyikwa’s talk will productively engage the medical education framework of structural competency in conversation with clinical bioethics towards a reimagined curriculum in everyday ethics for clinical providers. Using two ethically-fraught clinical cases encountered as a resident physician in both adult and pediatric medicine, she probes the felt experiences of moral injury among providers as, in part, a gap between an increasing understanding regarding the social and structural determinants of health and our capacity to act within that knowledge and our values.

Michelle Munyikwa received her MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and her Ph.D. in anthropology in 2019. She works at the intersection of medical and political anthropology, examining the interactions of trauma, history, and the law in practices of care in the United States. Her book project, The Spatial Promise of Refuge, explores these questions in the context of Philadelphia.  

Dr. Munyikwa has additional interests in medical education across the spectrum. She has conducted several curricular development projects dedicated to integrating social sciences and humanities concepts in medical education. Her work in this regard has been published in Academic Medicine and the New England Journal of Medicine.  

Currently, she is a resident physician in combined internal medicine & pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. She intends to pursue further training in infectious diseases.