As a teen, two concussions from hockey and ski racing left David Obert struggling to concentrate, unable to stay awake in class and in peril of being unable to finish high school. Now the HMS second year has been named a 2012 Rhodes Scholar, one of 83 men and women from 14 countries and regions around the world to win the prestigious award.
Obert, a native of Edmonton, Alberta and a graduate of McGill University in Montreal is one of three representatives from the prairie region of Canada. He was nominated for the Rhodes by Harvard Medical School.
Created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes, the scholarships cover all costs for two or three years of study at Oxford. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and physical vigor, among other attributes.
At Oxford, Obert plans to pursue a double master’s degree in public policy and global health science.
Obert spent the summer working on a joint Harvard/NATO study examining how foreign militaries contribute to health sector stabilization in fragile states. Specifically, he focused on a case study examining the military response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake as it related to human health. He worked with Vanessa Kerry, instructor in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Global Public Policy and Social Change Program in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and Margaret Bourdeaux, a core faculty member of Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Global Health Equity.
Obert says he has always had an interest in how the world works on a macro scale—seeing the geopolitical landscape and watching how large organizations and governments interact.
“I could see myself having a career a little bit like my supervisors from the summer,” he said. “I’d love to have the clinical side and patient contact — which brought me to medicine in the first place—but also be able to make an impact on another level, helping shape how big organizations work and how large scale responses to health needs are rolled out.”
