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LDI and Wharton’s Cynthia Chude Wins 2025 MiFF PhD Scholar Award

Selected for Current and Future Research in the Science of Amputee Care

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Wharton PhD student Cynthia Chude was presented with an award and a check for $50,000 to support her three-year research project. Chude, an Associate LDI Fellow has won the 2025 Mobility is Freedom-PhD Scholar Award. Presenting the symbolic check to Chude and Penn (right) is Thomas Fise, Vice President of the Mobility is Freedom Foundation. At left is one of Chude’s Penn mentors, LDI Senior Fellow Michael Anne Kyle, PhD, RN. (Photo: Hoag Levins)

Cynthia Chude, an LDI Associate Fellow and PhD student in the Health Care Management and Economics Department of the Wharton School, has been named the recipient of the 2025 Mobility is Freedom-PhD Scholar Award for her current and proposed research related to rehabilitation science for amputees.

The Mobility is Freedom Foundation, (MiFF), is a national organization that provides doctoral scholarships and educational grant support to address the lack of multidisciplinary integrated care models needed to improve the mobility, independence, and empowerment of people with limb loss.

The award and the $50,000 research grant that accompanies it were presented to Chude in a July 2 ceremony in the Wharton School’s Huntsman Hall.

“Our entire Mobility is Freedom Fund team joins me in congratulating Cynthia Chude as our 2025 PhD Scholar grant recipient,” said Charles Dankmeyer, President of the Mobility is Freedom Fund. “We are unanimous in our excitement that she is a gifted health professional pursuing extraordinarily promising research. Her demonstrated patient care talents, combined with her academic and research focus, will certainly provide her a long and distinguished career for the benefit of amputees and other mobility-impaired people.”

Wharton/Meharry Scholar

In 2021, Chude, then a medical student at Meharry Medical College, became the inaugural Escarce-Kington Scholar in a new Wharton Health Care Management and Meharry College joint MD/PhD program. She has completed three years of medical studies at Meharry and four years in Wharton’s PhD program and will graduate from Wharton in the spring of 2026. She will then return to Meharry to complete her final year of medical school in 2027.

Chude explained that she became interested in amputee care delivery during her third-year clinical rotations in Nashville, Memphis, and Detroit, where she worked with patients with diabetes who underwent amputations due to complications from peripheral arterial disease.

“That experience sparked my curiosity about the decision-making process surrounding amputation and, specifically, how and when physicians choose amputation versus limb-salvaging procedures,” she said.

Chude’s Penn mentors are LDI Senior Fellows Claudio Lucarelli, PhD, Marissa King, PhD, and Guy David, PhD, of the Wharton School, and Michael Anne Kyle, PhD, RN, of the Perelman School of Medicine.

Post-Amputation Interactions

“One chapter of my dissertation explores the clinical decision-making process,” Chude said. “Another investigates what happens to patients post-amputation, focusing on their interactions with the health care system.”

Her new research project, funded by MiFF and titled “Administrative Barriers: Understanding Patient Burdens in Amputee Care Delivery,” focuses on how care models influence patient trajectories in terms of physical function, re-amputation risk, the acquisition and use of prosthetics, and long-term independence.

“I am particularly interested in exploring how failures in multidisciplinary care contribute to both initial and subsequent amputations,” Chude said.

160,000 Amputations Annually

According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), 160,000 people with diabetes undergo lower-limb amputation annually, and 80 percent of all nontraumatic lower-limb amputations are due to diabetes complications.

The ADA characterizes the increasing diabetes amputation rate as “an urgent health challenge” and notes that “85 percent of diabetes-related amputations are preventable.”

The organization says, “Access to quality care and earlier intervention remains the challenge that leads to unnecessarily high rates of amputations, particularly among people of color. Black Americans face rates of amputations up to four times higher than non-Hispanic white Americans. Latinx communities are 50 percent more likely to have an amputation, and Indigenous communities face amputation rates that are two times higher than those among non-Hispanic white Americans.”

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