2024 Alumni Awards

Alu WISCO Mark Wallheiser Melissa Amundson ’99 Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon UW Majors: Biology and Molecular Biology After earning her undergraduate degree, Melissa Amundson enrolled in dental school, but she soon realized that she felt more drawn to surgery. She matched with a University of Miami residency program in maxillofacial surgery and was placed at a resource-limited hospital where Spanish was the predominant language, followed by Creole.

Luminary Award

The Luminary Award recognizes alumni who serve as aspirational examples for others through their accomplishments in the areas of leadership, discovery, progress,

and service. It celebrates extraordinary Badgers who

have demonstrated exceptional achievement in their professions, service or philanthropy.

“It was a totally foreign environment to me, but that prepared me for working in low-resource settings,” she says. In 2013, she joined a project in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to provide complex maxillofacial care and surgical training at the country’s only free hospital. She then joined Médecins sans Frontières/ Doctors without Borders. Her unusual specialty made her the only American doctor qualified to take on a challenging job: helping to revive a defunct hospital in Nigeria that specializes in serving children who have survived noma, a devastating form of gangrene that causes severe facial disfigurement. In 2016, Amundson performed some of the earliest surgeries at the new iteration of the hospital, and she’s returned to Nigeria almost every year since. Her contribution has shifted from personally performing surgeries to training local medical staff to handle most cases themselves. Stateside, Amundson is now based at the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. She’s the only maxillofacial surgeon within a 14-county radius and serves patients across the Deep South. “I try and counsel people who want to do humanitarian surgery abroad that it’s not easy,” she says. “There are a lot of people who need help here in the United States, and that is also very rewarding.”

14

WISCONSIN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION