Lauren Hughes

Lauren Hughes, MD, MPH, (born 1979) was elected the National President of American Medical Student Association (AMSA) in 2009, at the 59th AMSA Annual Convention. Prior to being elected president, she served three terms on the National Board of Trustees as a regional trustee, the National Junior Trustee-at-Large, and as the National Vice President for Internal Affairs. Hughes also served two terms on the AMSA Foundation Board of Directors and created the Rural Health Scholars Program within the AMSA Foundation.
An alumna of Iowa State University, she graduated with her BS in Zoology and BA in Spanish in 2002. During her undergraduate years, she studied abroad in Spain, served as president of her senior class, and interned at the National 4-H Council and at the National Cancer Institute. She co-directed the Freshman Honors Program, was awarded four consecutive presidential leadership scholarships, and established the Iowa 4-H Day at the Legislature program.
After graduating from Iowa State, Hughes volunteered for AmeriCorps at Lifelong Medical Care, a federally qualified community health center, in Berkeley, California. She provided health insurance outreach to low-income children and families, worked as a medical assistant at a free medical clinic and youth homeless shelter, and sewed baby quilts for expectant mothers. She lived and worked in New York City for one year before starting medical school at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in 2004.
During her education at Iowa, Hughes researched infectious diseases in Brazil, was a Robert Graham Center visiting scholar, and rotated overseas at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and at the Gonja Lutheran Hospital in northeastern Tanzania. She served as an Iowa City Free Medical Clinic volunteer, co-taught a first-year elective called Community Health Outreach, and was elected as president of the Medical Student Section of the American College of Preventive Medicine in 2006. She completed her MPH in health policy at The George Washington University in 2007, interning at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s Washington, DC, office and at the National Association of Community Health Centers.
As a future family and preventive medicine physician, Hughes plans to practice and teach in a community health center, volunteer internationally, and enter policy and advocacy work. Her research interests include primary care workforce development, rural and migrant health, and health care financing and reform.

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