LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES D. MANCUSO

I chose the Army because the main reason was they paid for my medical school and they paid me an officer salary during that time as well.

The residency programs in the military are on average much better than their civilian counterparts. But the reason why that is, is because the Army wants to make sure that everyone comes out of the program fully qualified. For that reason our residency training programs by objective standards such as board scores and passed rates they tend to be much better than their civilian counterparts.

There’s a lot of new development that are being worked on here at WARE, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. If we develop a vaccine for malaria that would have military importance, but also to protect our service members when they’re deployed to malarious areas, but also huge implications for global health. One of the advantages to working in the military is, the military still has a heart. The Pakistan deployment was really the best deployment that I’ve had, the best experience I’ve had in the Army.

A huge humanitarian crisis with lots of internally displaced people actually went out up into the mountain of Kashmir. We had a helicopter actually take us out there, to the top of a mountain and with a cooler of antibiotics and we would go out there and give them their antibiotic or vaccine or whatever they needed. So that was a really cool experience.