08/27/2026
Meet Maria Punchak, MD, MSc, our new Franke Fellow!
Dr. Punchak received her medical degree from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and completed neurosurgery residency training at the University of Pennsylvania followed by a pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at Texas Children's.
During her residency, she joined an educational trip to Mexico City with mission:brain. There, she met Mission:Brain Co-Founder and President and CEO Michael T. Lawton, MD, who told her about this newly established fellowship. It felt serendipitous to Dr. Punchak, who learned that the inaugural Franke Global Fellow was her former chief resident at Penn: Kerry Vaughan, MD, the current Africa site director for . The two had always talked about working together again.
Dr. Punchak's commitment to began during her undergraduate years and was shaped by experiences in resource-limited settings. After completing her master's degree in control of infectious diseases at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, she helped establish a community health worker program in rural Liberia delivering maternal and child health services.
That firsthand glimpse into the profound inequities in access to health care, combined with her passion for the technical challenges and high-acuity care of neurosurgery, led her to spend a year as a research assistant with The Program in Global Surgery and Social Change - The PGSSC at Harvard Medical School, studying the provision of and access to neurosurgical care in Uganda.
The Franke Fellowship provides Dr. Punchak with her first opportunity to practice as a fully trained pediatric in these settingsâa dream she's held since working alongside clinicians in Liberia, whose dedication profoundly influenced her medical journey.
"I am deeply grateful that this opportunity exists at Barrow, made possible through the generous support of the Franke family," she said. "I hope to contribute to a truly bidirectional exchange of knowledge and experience with our international neurosurgical colleagues and residents.
"Most importantly, I hope to build lasting partnerships that strengthen local capacity, advance neurosurgical education, and improve access to high-quality neurosurgical care in our partner countries for years to come."
