Prajwal Ciryam
FROM:
Born in a village in South India, grew up in a village in North Carolina.
HEROES:
Mohandas Gandhi, Rudolf Virchow, Quentin Young, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson.
PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT:
Convincing a brilliant team to pursue a crazy dream together.
SOMETHING YOU MIGHT TEACH AT THE SUMMIT:
There are two things that I think can make development work orders of magnitude better: 1) Confronting the tragedy of easy problems and 2) Capitalizing on the incredible talent and motivation of local individuals who want to improve their own communities.
SOMETHING YOU HOPE TO LEARN AT THE SUMMIT:
The problems and solutions that others have found in developing sustainable projects. Strategies to better organize and empower volunteers.
SOMETHING YOU ARE STRUGGLING WITH IN YOUR WORK:
Keeping an all-volunteer team motivated and productive; overcoming the paradox that funding requires a track record and a track record requires funding.
SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU HAPPY:
Friends and family who love me when I'm crazy and tell me when I'm wrong; playing the flute; Russian novels; ludicrous antics with boisterous people.
SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU ANGRY:
The vast numbers of people suffering from maladies and conditions we know how to solve.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR FAMILY:
My parents grew up in India--my mom in the country and my dad in the city. My mom was one of the top students in the state of Andhra Pradesh in college, but is completely understated about all of her accomplishments. Maybe that's why she's so good with her patients. She's a renal dietitian and former health department director who has a remarkable talent to connect with patients and coworkers whose life experiences and perspectives are totally different from hers. My dad did very well in college, too, but spent most of his time as a rabble rouser, leading students in months-long strikes, negotiating with the Chief Minister, and generally making trouble. After that, he settled down and became a professor of commerce. In the US, he has been in and out of academia, being involved in a variety of business and technology projects when not serving as a marketing professor. They came to the United States when I was a baby--sometimes things were easy, sometimes they were hard, and somehow, we eventually ended up in Williamston, North Carolina. Along the way, my little brother showed up. He's a great talker and a better thinker, and is now in high school in Charlotte. Often it seems our family pastime is playing devil's advocate, a habit I've carried over into other aspects of life, with mixed reception. When I was little, it seemed that life was about reading a lot of things and doing a lot of math. But somewhere amidst the algebra, my parents were making it clear to us what all this studying was really for. If we worked hard, we'd have the skills to help others, the tenacity to make sure other people were treated fairly, and the confidence to question authority as a rule--especially when it got in the way of the first two.
AN IDEA TO MAKE THE 30SUMMIT EVEN BETTER:
A willingness to debate, disagree, and explore alternative ideas.
BIOGRAPHY:
Prajwal Ciryam was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, and grew up in North Carolina, graduating from Williamston High School when he was 15. He earned a degree in Biological Sciences from Northwestern University's Honors Program in Medical Education in 2006. During college, he conducted Alzheimer's disease research in the laboratory of Professor William Klein, receiving the Katherine L. Kriegbaum Fellowship to support this work. He was also the student government Academic Vice President, co-host of a political talk radio show, and a columnist for the Daily Northwestern. Prajwal is currently an MD and PhD student in Northwestern's Medical Scientist Training Program. Under Professor Richard Morimoto, he is researching protein misfolding, a process that underlies Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Type II Diabetes, and other diseases. He also serves as the Executive Director of CatarACT International, a non-profit that fights the burden of curable blindness by partnering with West African surgeons to build sustainable cataract surgical clinics in their communities. Employing an established, sustainable model, CatarACT has recruited a leading Ghanaian ophthalmologist to open its first clinic in Accra, Ghana, in 2010. This clinic will serve as the anchor for a network of hospitals across West Africa that support and sustain each other. Prajwal's field work in India and Ghana were funded by the Mabie Global Health Fellowship. He has an interest in domestic health systems, as well. As a member of the steering committee for Health Care for All Illinois, he helped to organize grassroots action to promote the adoption of a universal, single-payer health system in the United States. Prajwal sees medicine in the broadest of terms, as a network of partnerships: Between biological systems and their environment, physicians and their patients, health systems and their society. At their best, all of these remarkably, improbably, strike the balance of life. Prajwal's projects incorporate a variety of angles on medicine to think about and build on these networks, from advocacy to development to basic biological research. In the coming year, Prajwal will research protein misfolding in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, as a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom.
