Rice senior to use Watson Fellowship to study global surgical inequities

BY ARIE WILSON PASSWATERS
Rice News staff

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation has named Rice University senior Drake LeBrun a 2011 fellow.

The foundation, which awards up to 60 fellowships each year to students from 50 outstanding private colleges and universities, provides each recipient with a $25,000 grant to study abroad independently for one year.

	DRAKE LEBRUN

LeBrun, a Hanszen College senior who is majoring in biochemistry and cell biology, will work in clinics and nongovernmental organizations in Uganda, Bangladesh, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago to understand the human side of surgery. Through cross-cultural discussion with patients and providers, he hopes to acquire a holistic understanding of the causalities and consequences that shape the human experiences of global surgical inequities.

“Surgical disease not only leads to morbidity and mortality, but it can also cause severe psychological trauma, place undue burdens on families, transform its victims into social pariahs and drain communities of livelihood and economic productivity,” LeBrun said.

Throughout his year of independent study, LeBrun hopes to gain a comprehensive understanding of how excessive burdens of surgical disease — a disease that requires surgical rather than medical intervention — weigh on the lives of people in the developing world. He will then use that knowledge to identify holistic, sustainable and culturally appropriate solutions to global surgical inequities in the future.

LeBrun is part of the Rice/Baylor College of Medicine Medical Scholars Program. He conducts clinical research in the Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and worked at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health last summer.

He also volunteers as a patient caretaker in the emergency room of The Methodist Hospital and serves as an academic fellow at Hanszen College.

After his year of studies under the Watson fellowship, LeBrun will begin medical school at Baylor. He plans to draw on his Watson experience in his future career as a surgeon.

For more information on the Watson Fellowship program, visit www.watsonfellowship.org/site/fellows/11_12.html.