UH Hilo alum Zaq Tman, now medical student, conducts award-winning research on sustainable practices in healthcare
Now a UC San Diego medical student, Zaq Tman is doing award-winning work, receiving international recognition for his passion on the advancement of sustainable health care and his commitment to climate and health leadership.
University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo alumnus Zachariah “Zaq” Tman (Anthropology, 2015) is on track to receive his medical degree this year from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He’s doing award-winning work as a medical student, receiving a 2024 Emerging Physician Leader Award in recognition of his passion for the advancement of sustainable health care and his commitment to climate and health leadership.
“As a Pacific Islander, it is deeply humbling and a profound honor to receive this award to support my future endeavors to promote sustainable health care, endeavors that also benefit the Pacific and my home islands,” says Tman, who hails from Yap.
Before enrolling in medical school, Tman completed his master of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from UH Hilo in December of 2015 with a bachelor of arts in anthropology and a minor in chemistry; he was student speaker at his commencement.
- Extraordinarily talented student to speak at UH Hilo’s 2015 Fall Commencement (Dec. 2015, UH Hilo Stories)
Tman recognizes UH Hilo as an important part of his pursuit to earn advanced degrees. “Things that I learned at UH Hilo are very important in my line of work now,” he says. “UH Hilo taught me soft skills for success and resilience.”
Coming to UH Hilo
Tman is a native of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia; when he first graduated high school he was simply eager to explore the world away from home. “To leave Yap at that time it was either you go to the military, you go to Guam, or you go to Hawaiʻi,” he says.
He was encouraged by his mother to prioritize further schooling over the military. So he applied to UH Hilo and secured funding with the Yap State Scholarship, the FSM National Scholarship, and the Asian Pacific Islander American Scholarship.
He found it relatively easy to adjust to living in Hilo despite being far away from home.
“Hawaiʻi in my mind is a big island,” he says. “It’s like a bigger version of Yap. Was there a big adjustment? Not so much. Coming from a very small island, things are bigger here. I’d never seen a big mountain before or snow on Maunakea. Those were the big changes.”
As an undergraduate at UH Hilo, Tman developed an interest in anthropology while fulfilling his general requirements. In his anthro coursework, he connected with Professor of Anthropology Lynn Morrison, who became a mentor to him.
“Lynn Morrison was a fantastic, fascinating mentor,” says Tman. “She was the first person to challenge me to make sure, whether I’m doing wet lab or pure science, to still instill a cultural component to it as well.”
His first research experience was with Morrison through a now-concluded federal program, Students of Hawaiʻi Advanced Research Program (SHARP), where Tman conducted qualitative research on stress responses in humane society workers, examining their emotional responses and how they adapted to their work with animals over time.
He also found mentorship in dance faculty Celeste Staton and Annie Bunker through aerial dance and ballet classes. “The biggest lesson they taught me was resilience. I needed a whole lot of that to move and live in the U.S.,” he says.
He also participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. He was a peer mentor; a member of the Big Island’s Youth Leadership Council for Suicide Prevention; and a representative of the JED Foundation, a mental health awareness non-profit.
He says of his experiences at UH Hilo, “I love that I started there because it was like a soft landing zone but also a great launching pad to everything that came after.”
The pursuit of advanced degrees
After graduation from UH Hilo, Tman enrolled in UC Berkeley’s master of public health program, which he chose because of its focus on infectious diseases. Berkeley gave him research opportunities in areas such as sexually transmitted diseases, and he networked with medical professionals in the Bay Area in preparation for medical school.
He decided to continue doing research after graduating from Berkeley to give himself time to apply for medical school. He got a position with the American Voices Project, a joint initiative of Stanford University and Princeton University located at Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality.
The project gave him the opportunity to live in different areas as he spent time in Beverly Hills, the Bay Area, and Phoenix, interviewing local residents about their financial struggles and investigating barriers to economic mobility.
He then matriculated to University of California San Diego in 2020.
Sustainability practices in medicine & award-winning work
Tman says he’s passionate and mindful about sustainability, and it has become part of his foundation in med school. He secured a research fellowship with Shira Abeles, a board-certified infectious disease specialist and medical director of antimicrobial stewardship at UC San Diego Health. “She was the one that challenged me to incorporate and get familiar with sustainability as part of medicine and surgery,” says Tman. “Because in the medical industry, we produce a ton of waste every hour.”
Working with Abeles, he soon realized that a focus on sustainability in medicine already suited much of what he already knew as a Pacific Islander and had learned at UH Hilo.
“The kinds of things that I’m taking for granted here are purely a luxury back home,” he explains. “That’s one thing that Hawaiʻi reinforced. That island mentality of everything is finite so be careful. Keeping in mind the utility of things and how finite they are.”
Inspired to dig deeper into sustainable health care, Tman took a gap year during med school to study sustainability practices and the high incidence of squamous cell oral cancer in his homeland of the Yap islands located in the West Pacific. In this work he also provided leadership in addressing climate health equity and the shortage of physicians in West Pacific island nations.
The work caught the attention of the international group Health Care Without Harm that has a mission to provide resources, knowledge, and inspiration for the health care sector to help reduce its environmental impact. The group selected Tman as a recipient of a 2024 Emerging Physician Leader Award, which noted his work “to improve health and health care education in the West Pacific, along with his career goal to advance sustainable health care practices in both the Western world and the Pacific Islands, an area exceptionally vulnerable to climate change.”
Awardees receive a grant to support a project that aligns with the goals of a major physician network, and Tman used the funding to create a resource toolkit for community health professionals that care for vulnerable populations facing climate change events, such as wildfire smoke and extreme heat, to help build community climate resilience. “We put together a toolkit that was truly tailored towards physicians here at UCSD and tried to make it part of the UC system,” he says.
Tman says he’s encouraged by the amount of effort he’s seen by physicians, nurses, and even patients to address the effects of climate change.
“I’ve discovered that there are mentors I didn’t know who are very into sustainability, climate change, and health,” he says. “They’re all across the healthcare system.”
The best place to start? UH Hilo.
Tman’s current studies and work in medicine has made him more aware of how UH Hilo has contributed to his skill set. He credits the diversity and variety of ideas and cultures in UH Hilo’s classrooms with helping him to become a better listener.
“One thing I’m really happy about is I routinely get praised by my colleagues, mentors, and physicians about how good I am with patients,” he says. “I think a big component to that is everything that I learned at UH Hilo when it comes to cultural awareness, the power in listening but also storytelling. Sharing your story but also incorporating the experience of others. Things that are not necessarily learned in the classroom but for whatever reason the environment at UH Hilo fosters that. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s there.”
“Starting at UH Hilo was probably the best thing I could have ever asked for,” he says.
Story by Sophia Kim-O’Sullivan, a graduate student in library science and information at UH Mānoa.
