ALUMNI HONORS
THE HUMANITARIAN : Gary Darmstadt makes change for those who need it most .
The mission of Gary Darmstadt , MD ’ 89 , to “ fill in the gaps ” as a global health and equality leader has taken him around the world and into an ever-broadening realm of effecting social change . From improving maternal and newborn care as a physician to being an advocate for family planning and gender equality , Darmstadt has led ambitious projects for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a variety of humanitarian initiatives at Stanford University , where he is associate dean of maternal and child health and a professor of neonatal and development pediatrics with its School of Medicine .
On choosing UC San Diego : “ I looked all over the place for medical school . I knew I wanted to be in a place at the cutting edge of science , where you could think about things in new ways and where there ’ s a lot of room for discovery and challenging conventions — conventional thought , conventional systems — that ’ s something that has really characterized my career . It ’ s always been about asking the questions , ‘ Is this really as good as we can do ?’ or ‘ If we completely rethought this , might we be able to do something
different and better ?’ UCSD cultivated that sense of inquiry , that joy of learning and being open-minded to what you may find . There was an excitement there , of being really up-and-coming . I remember thinking , ‘ This is going to be an exciting place to be .’”
On how his education lives on : “ When you ’ re working in really poor settings , a lot of it comes down to how you can give people hope and how you can dignify them and help them seize whatever opportunities they have , or help create better opportunities for them . Often that requires you to pause your own knowledge and put yourself in the position of a listener and an observer — somebody who is just simply seeking to understand — and that ’ s fundamentally what science is about . That was what I learned most at UC San Diego — we need to first understand . Whether it ’ s experiments in the laboratory or more on a large social scale of thinking about systems , let ’ s first seek to understand and only then begin to think about how you apply science and potentially bring in new knowledge .”
“ Let ’ s first seek to understand and only then begin to think about how you apply science and potentially bring in new knowledge .”
— GARY DARMSTADT , MD ’ 89
On what drives his work for women and children : “ I ’ ve always tried to look for where there were disparities , where I felt that there was a sense of injustice . I tend to look for where there are gaps — either gaps in attention , gaps in opportunity , gaps in knowledge — things that I felt were really important and where I felt like I had the skills and the knowledge to make a difference . And throughout my life that has been many things : newborn health , family planning , gender equality ; it ’ s been various things at various points in my career , but I think that theme of addressing disparity runs through them all .”
Hear more from Gary Darmstadt about what inspires his work at tritonmag . com / darmstadt
53 TRITON | SPRING 2017