With award of prestigious scholarship, Abaneh Ebangwese will travel to Cameroon for cardiovascular disease-related research.

University of Maryland School of Nursing (UMSON) PhD student Abaneh Ebangwese, Cert ’24, BSN ’15, RN, CCRN, has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship, becoming the first UMSON student ever selected for the honor. The Fulbright is a scholarship granted by the U.S. Department of State that supports research, study, and teaching opportunities in more than 140 countries.

As part of the 2025-26 Fulbright program, Ebangwese will travel in late December to Yaoundé, the capitol of Cameroon, where she will spend nine months conducting research to identify and analyze cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors among adults there. In preparing her Fulbright application, she discovered that Cameroon’s most recent peer-reviewed data on CVD prevalence dates back to 2017.

Her work will involve partnering with local health facilities and community stakeholders to collect survey and biometric data on health indicators such as blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol, diet, physical activity, smoking, sleep, and body composition. She also will use statistical methods to examine how these risk factors occur individually and in clusters within this population. This will provide insight into patterns of CVD vulnerability in an under-researched region of Sub-Saharan Africa.

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