Abstract
Each year, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) grants the Donald A. Pegg Student Leadership Award to four medical students who have shown exceptional commitment to advancing lifestyle medicine at their schools and in their communities. The 2025 recipients, Isabelle Ilan of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Ifrah Khurram of San Juan Bautista School of Medicine, Pamela Perepelitsky of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, and Crystal Chukwurah of Yale School of Medicine, each arrived at lifestyle medicine through their own experiences and pursued it in ways that reflected the needs of their unique communities. Over the past year, their work took many forms: a student-run culinary medicine program bringing whole food cooking into the Bronx, a culturally grounded lifestyle medicine revival in Puerto Rico, a lifestyle medicine service at an interprofessional student-run free clinic in Lake County, Illinois, and a preconception nutrition initiative at one of the country’s leading academic medical centers. What united them was a belief that medicine works best when it focuses on the whole person and addresses the conditions that make people sick, not just the sickness itself. This paper tells their stories and makes the case that student leadership, supported by the right resources, can change how the next generation of physicians thinks about health.
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