Embracing Home: Living, Learning, and Teaching in Sint Maarten

Dr. Neha Dayalani-Vaswani shares about her career and full-circle moments becoming a student, alumna, and professor at AUC in her native Sint Maarten. Watch her alumni spotlight.

For Dr. Neha Dayalani-Vaswani, MD ’17, Sint Maarten has been home her entire life. She grew up on the island and is an alumna and current faculty member at American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine.

In the six years between her time as a student and professor, one of the things she is most proud to see is pathways for local and nontraditional students to achieve their dream to become doctors.

The medical field can vastly benefit from nontraditional students because we’re bringing different backgrounds into the field of medicine. Our patient population is changing nowadays, so it’s not only about what you know but what kind of support you could offer your patient.

Dr. Dayalani-Vaswani is a board-certified pediatrician from the American Board of Pediatrics. She graduated from AUC in 2017 and returned to the institution’s Clinical Medicine Department as an assistant professor in July 2023. She currently teaches all clinical medicine modules and further puts her pediatric expertise to use as faculty head of the Pediatric Interest Group for AUC students.

During her time as a pediatric resident at Hurley Children’s Hospital in Flint, Michigan, Dr. Dayalani-Vaswani worked in various departments, including hematology-oncology, inpatient, outpatient, emergency, NICU, and PICU. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic during her fourth year of residency, the systemic challenges in Sint Maarten called her to return home; she joined the public health department to work on COVID mitigation and led the planning, launch, and execution of Sint Maarten’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign for children and adults.

A Lifelong Community at AUC

As both an instructor and alumna, Dr. Dayalani-Vaswani hopes to enrich current and future students with good clinical knowledge and guidance for the road ahead of them. Not just as aspiring physicians, but as members of a community caring for each other as often as patients.

"That community feeling that you build with each other [at AUC] is very important and it took me a long way, because these people that you make bonds with here really carry forward with you when you go out into different aspects of your career. Some of the best friends I’ve made in life were here at AUC."

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