Johns Hopkins wants to do its part to help displaced Syrian healthcare workers put their training and talents to good use.

The university is offering two full scholarships to its year-long Master of Public Health program, with the goal of having Syrian refugees use their knowledge to rebuild their home country's healthcare infrastructure when the time comes.

"We want them to use these new skills to rebuild or strengthen the public health infrastructure in Syria, ranging from immunization to clean air," Marie Diener-West, PhD, chair of the MPH program at Hopkins's Bloomberg School of Public Health, told MedPage Today. "There's a whole realm of public health that will need to be rebuilt."

Paul Spiegel, MD, MPH, who became director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins last July, pitched the idea of a scholarship program in early January, and the team hustled to get the word out, since the application deadline for the program is Jan. 31.

"We've had a lot of interest, so I'm hopeful that even with a short deadline we'll be able to find students," Spiegel told MedPage Today. "I assume many were already trying or hoping to get into a school of public health in North America or Europe, so when they hear this, it's a good opportunity that wasn't available before."

Spiegel is intimately familiar with the needs of displaced Syrian healthcare workers, having served until last July as a deputy director under the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Syrian medical professionals were "targeted to a degree we haven't seen before," he said, with hundreds being killed in hospital bombings or assassinated by the regime for treating people viewed as enemies of the state.

Like other refugees, Syrian healthcare workers moved to neighboring countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. But their credentials aren't valid outside of Syria, so they can't practice -- even though those places now have large populations of Syrian refugees who need their services, Spiegel said.

Offering a full-tuition scholarship to the 11-month MPH program could open a door that was previously closed to many of them, he said. The program would accept displaced Syrian workers living in several Middle Eastern countries as well as the U.S., and could be completed either in-person or online with some mandatory classroom time.

President Trump's promise to ban immigration from certain countries could limit the program's applicants, Spiegel acknowledged. He said the prospect of a ban is "concerning, and depending upon how long the order remains in effect, it could mean that only eligible Syrians inside the U.S. currently could come to Hopkins" -- but the program isn't limiting applicants at this time.

While two spots in one MPH program may be a "drop in the bucket compared with what the needs are," Spiegel is hopeful that more programs will offer similar opportunities to Syrian healthcare workers.

Currently, there's only one other MPH program in the U.S. that has given scholarships to Syrian students: Brown University in Rhode Island enrolled three in this year's class.

One of those students, Khaled Almilaji, told his story to the Associated Press in October. He had completed medical school and was about to do a residency in Germany when he was arrested in Damascus in 2011 for treating protesters, and was tortured while imprisoned for 6 months. After his release, he returned to his hometown of Aleppo, where treating activists against the regime was also a crime, so he eventually went to Turkey where he worked as a translator for Syrian patients in a hospital.

"We are so impressed by the resilience of these students," said Nele Feldmann, of the Institute of International Education, the foundation that administers the Fulbright scholarship program. "They manage to come here and finish full degree programs while worrying about their families that may still be in Syria or who are living as refugees in neighboring countries."

Feldmann, who is the senior program officer for IIE's Program for Education in Emergencies Response (PEER) program, said her organization is building a network of scholarships for displaced Syrian students that began in 2012 with six programs and has expanded to 65 today. The Hopkins scholarships are among them, and IIE also assisted with finding applicants for the Brown University program.

Although that list doesn't focus on healthcare workers or medical professionals, it includes many programs in the sciences, and is aimed at catering to the 400,000 displaced university-aged Syrian students, said Katherine Miller, who coordinates global education in emergencies for IIE.

While the scholarships cover tuition, IIE also tries to assist with funding for additional expenses such as housing and books whenever possible, Feldmann said.

She said the participating universities "see this as an opportunity to offer an international experience to their own domestic students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to study abroad or interact with someone from Syria."

Diener-West seconded the value of bringing in international students: "In our program, we find that students learn just as much from each other as they do from their curriculum and faculty experiences."