The Honzel Fellowship in Health Care Ethics is awarded to an outstanding (rising) senior in the, with a passion for ethics as it relates to health care. The Fellow serves as a peer mentor to students in the Health Care Ethics Internship and develops an ethics project with particular relevance to students and alumni.
Maria Sakurets, 2025-26 Honzel Fellow
Maria Sakurets' understanding of healthcare ethics was shaped in a Minneapolis dialysis clinic, where she worked with patients living in poverty, battling addiction, or missing treatments because they couldn't afford bus fare…or to march through the snow in a walker.
"You realize quickly that compliance isn't about willpower- it's about whether someone has a stable place to sleep or can get to the clinic three times a week. Let alone pick up their medication and adhere to the renal diet," she says.
Now an SCU senior double majoring in Neuroscience and Public Health, Maria has built her pre-med path around frontline healthcare experience. From pharmacy tech to EMT, from dialysis clinic to emergency room, each role deepened her understanding of how social factors impact health outcomes. Maria's academic focus bridges biological mechanisms with population health- a combination that reflects her goal of practicing medicine through a public health lens. On campus, she advises pre-health students through HPPA, directs the GenAction Club, and teaches an EMT skills lab through Mission College.
Her current role in the ER has reinforced hard-learned lessons; medical decisions extend far beyond the confines of clinical protocols. "Language barriers, socioeconomic factors, access to dependable caregiving- they all complicate what we think should be straightforward ethical choices," she observes. When Maria's family began hosting Ukrainian refugees, healthcare ethics became deeply personal.
"Had my parents not immigrated to the US, this could've easily been me," Maria reflects. "Questions about our obligations to displaced populations aren't abstract when refugees are sleeping in your basement."
Through the Ukrainian American Community Center, she helps fundraise for the Protez Foundation's work providing prosthetics to Ukrainian veterans and civilians. She and her family also help pack medical supplies that the UACC ships and distributes to Ukrainian hospitals.
As a 2024-25 healthcare ethics intern at the Markkula Center, Maria published an article examining racism in kidney care- connecting her dialysis experience with academic analysis of how race-based diagnostic tools and systemic inequalities perpetuate treatment disparities.
Maria plans to pursue a career in medicine with a focus on public health, particularly serving immigrant and refugee communities. "I want to treat patients holistically, addressing not just their medical conditions but the social determinants that created them," she explains. Her combination of clinical experience, cultural perspective, and academic grounding positions her to contribute meaningfully to healthcare ethics- especially around equity and cultural responsiveness in an increasingly diverse patient population. Maria is thrilled to be selected as this year’s Honzel Fellow and is eager to get to work.