Premed senior studies where farmwork and health care meet
Inspired by her family history in Venezuela, Michelle Gil Munoz is exploring her interests through medical anthropology.
Michelle Gil Munoz ’25 heard her family tell stories throughout her childhood in Maracaibo, Venezuela. They talked about the farm where her great-grandparents lived and worked without fancy farming equipment or electricity — long days laboring in the fields followed by pitch-black nights.
These stories inspire Gil Munoz’s academic, research and career aspirations as the premed senior studies the intersection of farmwork and medical access at UNC-Chapel Hill, 1,800 miles away from her homeland.
Farmworkers and physicians
Gil Munoz moved to Charlotte from Maracaibo in 2015 and to Chapel Hill six years later when she enrolled at Carolina. Though she never worked on her family’s farm in Venezuela, she has a deep knowledge and appreciation of farmworkers’ specialized skills and physical labor.
She credits her grandmother, a doctor in Venezuela, for sparking her passion for health care.
“I always knew I was going to major in biology,” Gil Munoz said. But anthropologist Jocelyn Chua’s Comparative Healing Systems class introduced her to another way of looking at health care: medical anthropology.
“It opened my eyes to how health disparities play a major role in the development of disease in certain populations, and it started my interest and passion for the major,” Gil Munoz said.
She decided to double-major in biology and medical anthropology, taking medical school prerequisite classes through the first and looking at health and illness through biological, cultural, political and economic lenses through the second.
She’s also minoring in Latina/o studies, working as a resident adviser with Carolina Housing and delving into research opportunities at the McKay genetics lab. Under the mentorship of graduate student Oscar Arroyo, she studied fruit flies to determine which maternal factors impact offspring and their development.
Gil Munoz interned with the Equity and Environmental Justice Program through the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she researched genes associated with endometrial cancer. She also worked at Oerth Bio, a local startup that studies the efficiency of current farming practices, and the nonprofit Student Action with Farmworkers, based in Durham.
The diverse experiences and knowledge she gained led to a new goal: combining her areas of interest and conducting original research.
Research in the field
With a 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship through the Office for Undergraduate Research, Gil Munoz began her investigation of the health care experiences of farmworkers in the greater Triangle area. She spent the summer working with local organizations to interview farmworkers near Benson, about an hour from Chapel Hill.
“The primary goal of my study is to understand how working conditions and social inequalities affect farmworkers’ health in the long term and short term as well as their willingness and ability to seek medical attention,” she said.
In mobile clinics, she observed interactions and translated conversations between medical providers and Spanish-speaking workers. She spent time in the fields with workers and visited their homes and communities.
The conversations that resonated most with her and the workers she interviewed, she said, were ones centered around family — parents and grandparents that, like Gil Munoz’s, passed down skills and knowledge and worked to provide for their children and loved ones.
After graduation, Gil Munoz hopes to attend medical school and become a pediatrician or a family medicine provider. She plans to continue to serve the farmworker community through her future medical practice and volunteer work.
