Torch bearers

“You’re called to think hard about what it means to have the privilege of education,” Farmer (left, with J. Joseph Burns, associate academic vice president for undergraduate programs, and Grace Simmons ’05, UGBC president) told the freshmen. “These four years here, this is your chance. I think that you have something really precious before you that most people in the world don’t have.”

A graduate of Duke University and Harvard Medical School, Farmer began his work in Haiti following a visit to that nation as an undergraduate. While in medical school he helped found Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health) in Haiti, where he still serves as medical director. The small medical staff sees nearly 220,000 patients each year. He has also written extensively about health care in poor areas around the world.

Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” and a Heinz Foundation Award, Farmer gave prize money totalling $470,000 to Partners In Health, a Boston-based organization that he cofounded in 1987 to provide health care services for people dying of treatable diseases.

Farmer is chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the Lillian and Maude Presley Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.