This year’s devastating Ebola epidemic got everyone’s attention. But at URI, global health and the in-depth study of infectious diseases have been front and center for a long time.

Professor Roger LeBrun’s honors class—The Global Challenge of Emerging Infectious Disease—has become a springboard for students interested in a career in medicine but who aren’t sure they want to take the traditional medical school route. He says many of his students get so excited by what they learn about public health and infectious disease in far-off places that they find a way to travel to these destinations to do what they can to help. And Professor LeBrun does what he can to make that possible.

He has arranged student internships in developing nations around the globe—from an HIV orphanage in South Africa to a women’s health clinic in Peru. And when these students return home, they help teach other students in the class. “They’re not going to glamorous places like Venice or Paris,” he said. “They’re going to the poorest of the poor countries to help change lives there. And when they come back, the students are transformed. It has been an amazing success story.”

It opened my mind to all the different things I could do with medicine, like global health and the role culture and economics play in health care.

Austin Demers, who graduated last spring, is one of those successes. She had planned to become a doctor, but Professor LeBrun’s class took her in another direction. “It opened my mind to all the different things I could do with medicine, like global health and the role culture and economics play in health care,” she said. “It was fascinating.”

She decided to further explore what she had learned by traveling to India with funding from a Metcalf Scholarship from the Rhode Island Foundation. She spent four weeks last January in Mumbai, observing surgeries, visiting slum clinics, and talking to doctors who treat patients with AIDS and leprosy. Now she is a candidate for a Fulbright Scholarship to study health care in Turkey.

But infectious diseases aren’t only a problem in the developing world. Right here in Rhode Island, Pharmacy Professor Jef Bratberg is preparing his students to be on the front lines of a disease epidemic. He teaches pharmacy students how to recognize outbreaks of infectious diseases, how they spread among populations, and what the symptoms look like. And he works with the Rhode Island Department of Health to certify students as “mass antibiotic dispensers” so they can respond to potential outbreaks of small pox, anthrax, Ebola, flu, or other infectious diseases.

Professor Bratberg also runs a mock dispensing clinic with emergency response personnel from around the state. The first one even included human zombies wandering around campus and “infecting” students, who were then delivered to the clinic.

If zombies aren’t your thing, then you might prefer to study infectious disease from a molecular biology perspective. At the Institute for Immunology and Informatics at the URI Providence campus, you could learn how to develop vaccines with Professor Annie De Groot, who was recently named one of the 50 most influential people in the vaccine industry. She leads research into vaccines for malaria, influenza, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and others. Or join Professors Alan Rothman and Carey Medin in the development of therapies for dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that infects 100,000 people a year. Back at the Kingston campus, you could also team up with Pharmacy Professor Kerry LaPlante on studies of pneumonia or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

 

Related link: Take a look inside a recent Global Challenge of Emerging Infectious Disease class (from the Winter 2014-2015 issue of QuadAngles Online.