By Browning Brooks

FSU Communications Group

FSU medical student Lisa Earnest finds it amusing that she has become a local celebrity since she won a national humanitarian award for helping medically needy people.

She's been interviewed on television, featured in newspaper articles, lauded by administrators and asked to be the subject of a student video project.

She's one of five winners of the American Association for Higher Education's Howard R. Swearer Award for Humanitarian Service. On April 4, she received the 1995 FSU President's Undergraduate Humanitarian Award.

The attention is flattering. But if it helps spread the message about free health care, that will be the real prize.

"It's a privilege that I'm going to be a physician," Earnest said, "and it is my duty to make sure that everyone who needs medical care is getting it."

She means it. When Earnest saw people who were unaware of free health care at a local clinic, she went to them.

At a flea market, a neighborhood grocery, a quickie market and a street corner, she set up free screenings, with the help of health professionals and other students in FSU's Program in Medical Sciences.

"I was concerned that the people who most needed the help didn't know we were here," she said.

She was recently named the first student on the clinic's board of directors.

A bubbly 21-year-old from Charleston, S.C., Earnest has organized and delivered medical services to the homeless, migrant farm workers and their families, at-risk children and battered women.