{"id":103450,"date":"2019-10-07T11:37:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T15:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=103450"},"modified":"2019-10-07T11:37:34","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T15:37:34","slug":"assessing-the-toll-of-chemical-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/assessing-the-toll-of-chemical-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing the Toll of Chemical Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jenna Dovydaitis has been interested in the intersection of public health and international security ever since she can remember.<\/p>\n

Growing up, the political sciences<\/a> and biology<\/a> double major and Burnett Medical Scholar<\/a> says, \u201cmy version of the superhero was always that doctor that saves the day from a super disease that takes over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

That passion for science and geopolitics has only grown at UCF. Working under the supervision of G\u00fcne\u015f Murat Tezc\u00fcr, chair of UCF\u2019s Kurdish Political Sciences<\/a> program, Dovydaitis has been working on an honors undergraduate thesis examining the medical and political ramifications of the Anfal campaign, an infamous chemical weapons attack perpetrated by Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime in the late 1980s that resulted in the genocide of an estimated 50,000-100,000 Kurds.<\/p>\n

The risk of chemical weapons being used in future terrorism attacks makes this a particularly salient topic for study, Dovydaitis says.<\/p>\n