So, what did you do during your summer vacation?

Medical students Jessica Telleria and Alexa Bisinger spent their summer in Cali, Colombia, 'The Capital de la Salsa.' But they didn't have time for dancing. They spent their days in maternity clinics searching out pregnant women to donate blood samples and to answer questionnaires.

Their goal: to discover how interactions with untreated water, raw meat, soil or cats might predict infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Adults usually suffer a mild flu when they catch the protozoan; however, if a woman becomes infected for the first time when pregnant, it can trigger a miscarriage.

Under the direction of Jose Montoya, MD, associate professor of infectious diseases and geographic medicine, the second-year medical students met with more than 300 women at three hospitals: two that serve low-income patients and one that serves wealthy patients. The two often worked 18-hour days to overcome chronic shortages of medical supplies at the hospitals serving poorer communities.

Courtesy of Jessica Telleria

Jessica Telleria (left) and Alexa Bisinger in Cali, Colombia, where they spent the summer working in maternity hospitals, studying a parasite that can harm pregnant women.

'It was bare bones, but they were doing the best they could.' Telleria said. 'It would take an entire day just to find dry ice to transport our blood samples from one hospital to another.'

Telleria and Bisinger weren't the only productive School of Medicine students this summer - though their ability to resist Cali's summer salsa festival might prove they had the greatest willpower. While some paused laboratory experiments on campus to welcome talented undergraduates to the world of graduate research, another visited North Korea.

Fourth-year graduate student Fraser Tan, alongside other students and postdocs, helped undergraduates from across the world sharpen their laboratory skills through the Stanford Summer Research Program. Thirty-four undergraduates spent eight weeks learning what doctorate research is really like, under the guidance of lab mentors and program assistants. They also learned how fun Stanford life can be by taking kayaking trips in Monterey, riding roller coasters in Santa Cruz and snapping pictures of drag queens in San Francisco as part of a scavenger hunt.

'They are all incredibly bright and all incredibly full of wonderful enthusiasm,' Tan said.

Courtesy of Eugene Lim

Eugene Yim (third from right) and fellow delegates pose near North Korea's Mount Baekdu. During the summer, Yim met with North Korean officials to learn their views on medical foreign aid collaborations.

Once a week, Tan met with four young women to help them interpret their findings and prepare posters and PowerPoint presentations. The immediate satisfaction of assisting the students offered a refreshing break, Tan said, from the delayed satisfaction of her experiments on lung cells in mice. 'It's been a nice way to delineate my summer,' she said. 'It was tons of fun.'

Across the globe, third-year medical student Eugene Yim ventured to a place few students, let alone travelers, have the opportunity to enter: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. For two weeks in July he researched health-care officials' opinions on the effectiveness of medical foreign aid collaborations. 'It has been hard to get the North Korean perspective on this issue,' Yim said.

Yim toured the country with a handful of other participants in the DPRK Education and Exposure Project sponsored by the Nodutdol Corp., a nonprofit organization based in New York with the mission of developing a sense of community among Korean Americans. During his stay in the capital Pyongyang, Yim met with doctors and the deputy director of foreign relations in the ministry of public health to get their perspectives on the success of humanitarian support from abroad.

Courtesy of Eugene Lim

Yim (kneeling) in front of the Children's Palace in Pyongyang. The group's tour guide was a young girl (fourth from right).

In later phases of his research, Yim will meet with representatives of U.S. agencies providing medical aid to North Korea to share what he's learned.

As a Korean American who grew up in the United States, Yim said the visit challenged his preconceptions. Life there was not as bleak as expected. 'There is a lot that the American media has portrayed inaccurately,' Yim said. 'It allowed me to see both sides critically.'

Yim expressed gratitude for the funding he received from Stanford's Medical Scholars Research Program, which supported his project and will enable him to continue contributing to a cause he cares deeply about through the fall. Yim encouraged classmates to take advantage of funding at Stanford to go after personal passions.

'As students, we're limited in what we can do,' Yim said. 'But research with the right topic and resources is really a way to make a difference.'

Brian Lee is a science-writing intern in the medical school's Office of Communication & Public Affairs.