A Real Survivor: Kelly Bruno

Newswise — Kelly Bruno is a second-year medical student in the UNC School of Medicine.

She also has been an amputee since the age of six months, when the lower part of her right leg was removed because of a birth defect. But she was fitted with a prosthetic leg soon thereafter and has been doing extremely well in sports ever since, including baseball, soccer, track and long-distance running, and Ironman triathlons.

And this fall Kelly came to be known to millions of TV watchers as "Kelly B." -- one of the castaways on "Survivor: Nicaragua."

Filming for the show took place in the summer, between Kelly's first and second years of med school. Sadly, her father -- a physician whose example helped inspire Kelly's interest in medicine -- was killed in the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, about the same time that Kelly was going through the application process for Survivor. Once on the show, she performed well in the physical challenges but found herself the target of unusually harsh treatment by one of the other castaways. And some of her competitors speculated that Kelly B. might be a threat to win the grand prize of $1 million. So, she was voted off the show about half way through the season.

Now she's back in medical school, focusing on her future in medicine.