The Gisela Pack Foundation is a non-profit charity fund which enables talented and carefully selected high school graduates with a migration background to successfully study natural sciences or medicine.
The charity foundation supports gifted and motivated students with mentoring, IT infrastructure, financial support for educational material and scholarships, both full and partial.
For the foundation, it is neither origin, religion nor mother tongue that counts. Only the motivation and ability to study a natural science or medicine along with the determination to successfully pursue a career and make the best use of the community in the long term.
Although talent for medicine and sciences as well as ambition can be found equally in all social groups and ethnicities, high school graduates are encouraged and promoted in very different ways depending on their social and ethnic backgrounds.
Migrants, especially refugee families from warzones, are often confronted with huge but unnecessary hurdles in Western Europe’s educational systems. Migrants can even be actively discouraged to start studying science or medicine.
Pressure to undertake occupations outside of University education can come from multiple origins such as social, environmental and even some teachers and Career Counsellors. The interests of gifted high school graduates in studying medicine or a natural science is not heard or simply not taken seriously.
Outstanding examples such as the founders of BioNtech, Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin show that there is huge but mostly untapped potential here. As physicians and entrepreneurs with migration backgrounds, both have had a decisive impact in the battle against Covid. They were instrumental in the rapid development of the BioNtech-Pfizer vaccine which has effectively curtailed the impact of the pandemic with invaluable benefits for society and the health of millions of vaccinated people.
However, high school graduates with an interest to study sciences or medicine often lack experienced interlocutors from medicine or entrepreneurs in life science R&D to give advice, or work as longer-term as mentors on the way to become an M.D. or Ph.D..
In many cases, there is already a lack of easily accessible information about life science careers or simple basic IT infrastructure for migrants to find out more about career opportunities. This can hinder their ability to apply to universities and to successfully study natural sciences or medicine.
Already a few informational talks as well as financial and other donations such as laptops can make a tangible difference for a successful career path in life sciences. This in turn can be of benefit to the whole society which urgently needs more scientists and medical doctors.
Your donations will help us to make the difference for migrants and refugees!
