Sinaloan Awarded for the first time: Academic excellence in medicine

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The student of the Faculty of Medicine of the UAS, Eliezer Villanueva, will receive from Pfizer laboratories the prize for academic excellence.

For the first time, a student from Sinaloa will be awarded the Pfizer Award for academic excellence. Eliezer Villanueva Castro, student of the Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, will be the winner on this occasion.

The Pfizer Prize for academic excellence is awarded annually in collaboration with the Mexican Association of Faculties and Schools of Medicine AC The call is delivered directly to the universities, and these enroll students who meet the requirements.

Eliezer Villanueva Castro is 26 years old and is currently taking on the social service in the area of research at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition “Salvador Zubirán”. The project he is working on is arm transplantation, vascularized composite allograft, that is, transplanting arms by a donor.

Always wanted to be a doctor

Eliezer always dreamed of being a doctor. His mother is a nurse and since childhood, he lived with his mother’s vocation and listening to stories about helping people.

He became fascinated by medicine and since he could not enter hospitals, he started looking for television programs about doctors.

“I found in Discovery a program that came out of surgery and emergencies, I started to see that and I was very surprised by the surgical part,” he said.

“As the doctors arrived, they repaired and seemed to do magic with their hands,” the student added.

He is still doing social service, but Eliezer already knows that he wants to specialize in order to perform reconstructive transplants.

For this Eliezer will have to specialize in surgery, then plastic surgery to perform microsurgery and reconstructive surgeries.

“Microsurgery is like the specialty of reconstruction of plastic surgery, they do vascular surgeries with microscopes, they are vascular sutures for reconstruction of anything,” explained Eliezer.

With this type of surgery, you can perform transplants to amputee patients, close ulcers with implants, or face transplants, he said.

For reasons of destiny, Eliezer was born in Guasave, Sinaloa, but grew up in Los Mochis.

In the first instance, the young man became interested in military medicine, and applied the test but was rejected. The situation that led him to study at a private school in Durango, where he studied until the third year.

Narrated Eliezer, that as a result of its private studies in another state, the economic situation of its family was harmed, a reason why it took the decision to enter the Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, in which it lost a year by the revalidation.

Wants to contribute to the field of microsurgery

As a doctor, Eliezer would like to contribute to the field of medical research on allograft vascularized composite transplants, that is, from a donor.

“Since any missing or damaged part of the body could be replaced structurally in any person, be it hand, nose, ear, you just need to get an effective immunosuppressive treatment and without so many side effects for the patient,” he said.

Eliezer Villanueva Castro will receive the award on August 2 in Mexico City.

By Karen Bravo