Spring 2025 News

Welcome from the Director

Welcome to the Spring 2025 Medical Humanities Newsletter! We are delighted to feature a selection of updates on medical humanities work by faculty, students, and researchers at Rice University, including news about several collaborations with colleagues in the Texas Medical Center and around the world. Check out the In the News link below for all of the recent Rice News stories about our work, including the founding and launch of our Medical Humanities Research Institute, and be sure to join our feeds to stay in touch.

	Interview with Dr. Luziris Pineda Turi View the Spanish interview with Dr. Luziris Pineda Turi as part of “La Comunidad Latina” series for El Heraldo de México. Read More
	Faculty Spotlight Dr. Chin Jou is an Associate Professor of History and steering committee member of the Medical Humanities Program and Medical Humanities Research Institute. Read More
	MOU for International Research Collaboration Rice University and Taipei Veterans General Hospital (TVGH) signed a Memorandum of Understanding on September 26, 2024 during Dr. Kirsten Ostherr’s visit to Taipei as an invited guest speaker at the 2024 National Health Research Institutes Forum International Conference on Telehealth. Read More
	Seed Funding for Collaborative Research with France The Medical Humanities Research Institute was awarded matching seed funding by Rice Global for a collaborative research exchange with Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CMH) and École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). Read More
	Clinical Immersion Summer Program Karla Balleza, Hamza Saeed, Sanjay Soni, Priyanka Subramanian, and Andrew Sun participated in the 2024 Clinical Immersion Summer Program with Texas Children’s Hospital and Texas Heart Institute. Read More
	Sawyer Seminar Series Updates on the yearlong Sawyer Seminar series on “Reimaging Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice.” Read More
​​	Rice-McGovern Center Sawyer Seminar Fellows Meet the five Sawyer Seminar Fellows from the UTHealth Houston McGovern Medical School. 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 Read More
	Medical Student Spotlight Emma Thames is a Rice-McGovern Center Sawyer Seminar Fellow. She is a 4th-year medical student at UTHealth McGovern Medical School with a concentration in medical humanities. Read More
	Clinician Spotlight Dr. Paul Checchia is the inaugural Clinician Fellow of the Medical Humanities Research Institute. Dr. Checchia is Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and serves as Associate Division Chief for Cardiac Services and Business Operations of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital. Read More
	Postdoctoral Fellow Spotlight Dr. Samin Rashidbeigi is the Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Medical Humanities Research Institute. She received her PhD from Princeton University. Her dissertation was on “Convictions and Persuasions: Transfusion Technology and the Blood Donor in Modern Iran.” Read More
	Student Spotlight Hamza Saeed is a junior at Brown College majoring in Bioengineering. He is also pursuing a minor in Medical Humanities and intends to pursue a M.D./P.H.D. On a typical day, you can find him in a BRC lab, Brown’s movie room, at the gym, or in a nearby restaurant. Read More
	Moving Human Flourishing to the Center of Health and Care Learn more about Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute and the work that we do in bringing together humanists, artists, social scientists with engineers, natural scientists, and clinicians to address healthcare challenges that cannot be solved by science or technology alone. Watch Video
	In the News Medical Humanities featured in Rice News. Read More

Upcoming Sawyer Seminar Lectures

• March 6: Sawyer Seminar Research Symposium (all day)
• Symposium Speakers
• April 10: Roderic Crooks (University of California, Irvine)
  "Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality"

Lectures will be held at 4pm. More details can be found at mhri.rice.edu/sawyer.

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