Volunteer Spotlight: Isabelle Maricar, Volunteer Medical Assistant

Volunteers founded Culmore Clinic in 2007. To this day it is still significantly volunteer run. Regularly, we like to spotlight our volunteers as they are essential to Culmore Clinic continuing to provide quality, culturally sensitive healthcare at little to no cost to our uninsured patients. 

For Volunteer Appreciation Month, we sat down with Isabelle Maricar, a Volunteer Medical Assistant, to learn more about what she loves most about volunteering with us, her life on the dance floor, and what she’s learned first hand about the sociodemographic factors affecting our patients' health.

What do you do at Culmore Clinic?

Since last October I’ve been volunteering as a medical assistant. I thought that working in a free clinic setting would be a great opportunity to gain clinical experience and spend time working with underserved patient populations. I was right. 

I often take vitals for patients or run in-house tests. Thanks to my clinical experience from my last job at a private practice, I occasionally get to work with nurses to do intake (gather medical history/reason for visit) or discharge (provide patients information on medications, labs, imaging, or future appointments). Once in a while, I'll also train volunteer medical assistants new to The Clinic.   

Tell us about your career - where did you train, where do you work?

I graduated from William & Mary in 2021 with my Bachelor's in Chemistry. I'm currently doing public health research with the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education. As a researcher, I've been doing literature reviews and preparing manuscripts related to health disparities among Asian Americans as well as the importance of data disaggregation to highlight these disparities. Because all of my work is virtual, my time is flexible and I have a nice balance between work, volunteering with Culmore, and my personal life. 

What do you do when you're not working and volunteering with us?

I'm an avid dancer! While I know a variety of dances, I predominantly do Lindy Hop, which is a swing dance that originated in Black communities in Harlem around the 1930s. I began dancing in college but started taking the dance seriously during the pandemic. Since then I've had the privilege of traveling to dance events around the country (and sometimes competing!). I go dancing in D.C. at New Columbia Swing on a weekly basis, and it's always a great time to social dance and catch up with friends. 

Isabelle dancing at New Columbia Swing (Photo Credit: Jerry Almonte)

Isabelle (second from left) pictured with the rest of the Culmore Clinic Medical Assistant Team