The Rice University Medical Humanities Research Institute recently hosted the yearlong Sawyer Seminar, titled “Reimagining Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice.” The seminar, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and supported with additional Rice funds from the Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity (BRIDGE) Program and Scientia/De Lange Conference, had a specific objective: to mitigate inequities in patient outcome through a collaboration spanning academic background, research methodology, and perspective. The result was a greater collective understanding of the shortcomings of existing health equity models and future routes for innovation.
The seminar consisted of activities throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, including an invited speakers series, reading groups, workshops with local providers and patient advocacy groups, a public research symposium, and meetings with journalists on methods to raise awareness about these issues with broad audiences. Panel discussions and research presentations focused on pressing issues in the clinical space, including human-centered AI integration into patient care, identifying the benefits and downsides of health technology, studying human bias as presented in algorithms and medical device fabrication, and the employment of humanities perspectives in medical technology innovations.
For our predoctoral fellows, Nkili Cooper and Jie (Joy) Chen, the Sawyer Seminar proved to be a rare and valuable opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary research with scholars from across disciplines and institutions and build valuable professional relationships that further their respective research interests.
Nkili Cooper, a PhD candidate in History, called the experience “radically interdisciplinary.” She noted that while Rice’s graduate programs foster interdisciplinary work, the Sawyer Seminar was unique in bringing together “individuals from seemingly disparate fields: medical students; philosophy, religion, and history doctoral candidates; and practicing physicians” for bi-weekly conversations with faculty from across campus. The fellowship directly inspired her to author a white paper arguing that “humanists are uniquely qualified to intervene in and help practitioners mitigate the effects of America’s loneliness epidemic.”
Joy Chen, a PhD candidate in Philosophy, found the seminar greatly enriched her work by allowing her to apply her research work in ethical theories to “real-world ethical issues in biomedical and clinical contexts.” During the fellowship, Chen completed a white paper on women’s mental health during the IVF process and a research paper on therapeutic approaches in clinical ethics consultations. Chen and Cooper also co-authored a piece for The Polyphony that discussed the events of the seminar, insights gained, and their respective takeaways. Additionally, as a result of the relationships built at the Seminar, Chen has also begun developing a qualitative study on the use of sedation in end-of-life care with MHRI clinician fellow Dr. Paul Checchia and two other physicians from Texas Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Samin Rashidbeigi served as the postdoctoral fellow and played a key role in the success of the predoctoral fellows and the seminar as a whole. Her mentorship in the writing and documentation processes were pivotal to ensuring that Chen and Cooper developed translational communication skills.
Image: Computer specialist John Smith arranges and examines cannisters of magnetic tape used in the processing of medical data at the National Library of Medicine (c. 1960). Source