USUHS Alumni Unite to Deliver Humanitarian Assistance in Brazil

by Brazilian Riverine Mission Public Affairs


AMAZON RIVER, Brazil -- Lt. Cmdr. Robert Lennon (University Services University of Health Sciences Class of 2009, USUHS Assistant Professor of Family Medicine) is a Family Medicine physician at Naval Hospital Jacksonville and serves on the faculty of their Family Medicine Residency. Lt. Cmdr. John Roman (USUHS Class of 2012, USUHS Assistant Professor of Dermatology) is a dermatologist at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. They are currently deployed on NAsH Carlos Chagas, a Brazilian Naval Hospital ship, to provide care to the riverine community in the Amazon.

Lt. Cmdr. Robert Lennon

“The USUHS community in military medicine is quite small,” Lennon said. “John and I first met when he was a medical student doing a rotation at Naval Hospital Jacksonville. We overlapped again in Okinawa, Japan, and now find ourselves sharing a room on a Brazilian Hospital ship in the middle of the Amazon.”

“I love having an extended USUHS family,” Roman added. “Having a friendly face with shared experiences makes remote deployments easier. The training we get at USUHS – in particular, exercises like Bushmaster and Kerkeshner - makes integrating with foreign navies much easier, and one of our goals on this mission is to invite our Brazilian counterparts to come to the U.S. to experience that unique training.”

Lt. Cmdr. John Roman

The Brazilian Riverine Mission is a joint effort between Commander, U.S. Fourth Fleet and the Brazilian Navy’s Ninth Naval District, whose mission is to provide care to local populations, build medical interoperability in support of joint humanitarian and disaster relief missions, and exchange medical knowledge. This is the third mission of its type and is serving as a platform to expand the U.S. Navy’s tropical medicine training opportunities, which will ultimately combine training at the Tropical Medicine Institute in Manaus followed by a joint medical mission within the Amazon River basin.