Sarah Michler

For eight years, Sarah Michler, an undergraduate student at Cornell University, has advocated for children with heart conditions in Central and South America. Sarah Michler works with Heart Care International, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based not for profit organization that provides free cardiac surgery to indigent children throughout the developing world. Michler traveled to the Dominican Republic and El Salvador on medical missions with Heart Care International, assisting the Executive Director. While there, Michler supplied operating rooms, prepared children for surgery, translated for physicians, and provided emotional support for patients and families. Her photographs and presentation of the Heart Care International mission in El Salvador was presented to the President of El Salvador. Two years before graduating from Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, Sarah Michler founded Reach Out Onuva, a charity that brings American high school students to volunteer at Onuva, a combined school, health care clinic, and orphanage in El Salvador. In 2010, Sarah Michler interned with Dr. Alejandra Guerchicoff at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Under Dr. Guerchicoff’s direction, she compared congenital heart disease (CHD) between populations in the United States and Argentina. In the spring of 2011, she expanded her research on CHD in Argentina at Universidad de Buenos Aires. During her time in Buenos Aires, Sarah Michler conducted in-depth research on public health in Argentina, specifically in regard to treating children with CHD. After studying the effects of Argentina’s “Plan Nacer”, a program to assist children with CHD, she wrote a 39-page research paper in Spanish detailing the results of her study. Sarah Michler spent the summer of 2011 as a Research Assistant at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, focusing on HIV and AIDS care for women of color. She also interpreted for patients who spoke Spanish and translated forms from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. Currently, Michler continues her studies at Cornell. She expects to graduate in May 2012 with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology.