The Department of Bioengieering Welcomes Health Equity Advocate and Writer, Dr. Uche Blackstock, for Lunch with Grad Students
During her Arts and Lecture tour, Dr. Uche Blackstock visited the Bioengineering Department and spoke with the students about health inequities and how scientist's work affect the public.
As Dr. Uché Blackstock made her rounds in her Arts and Lecture tour, she stopped by the Bioengineering Department for lunch with the department’s graduate students. During lunch, they discussed how to discern health inequities. Their discourse extended into how scientists and engineers can better understand their work’s effects on the public.
Dr. Uché Blackstock is a remarkable person with whom to engage in such topics. She, along with her twin sister, Oni, graduated from Harvard Medical School, following her mother’s footsteps. This was an exceptional achievement as it would mark the first Black mother-daughter Harvard Medical School graduates.
Throughout her medical studies, she says she was told to see the world through a “scientific, objective, and evidence-based lens.” Her lens, however, moved to focus on how Black patients’ health was negatively affected by state-enforced segregation and medical racism. She speaks of how systematic racism is affecting the BIPOC community’s health in her NYTimes bestselling book, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine.
Throughout her Arts and Lecture tour, Dr. Blackstock illuminated this darkened fact. It was a privilege for the Dept. of Bioengineering to host her and have the opportunity to hear her powerful story and her advice for researchers.
