Illinois Medicine

urbana-champaign by Melissa Maleske Global Compa G Whether he's heat-sealing beans and rice or working to make HIV/AIDS diagnostics more accessible, Gregory Damhorst is driven by a dedication to service. REGORY DAMHORST WAS VISITING his hometown of Elgin, Ill., in early 2010 when, on something of a whim, he attended an event where he worked an assembly line packaging meals to send to Haiti earthquake survivors. Damhorst had just finished his undergraduate studies in phys- ics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a semester ahead of schedule, and he thought a meal-packaging project would be perfect for Interfaith in Action, a student group for which he had served as president. Today, as a second-year MD/PhD student in the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign's Medical Scholars Program, Damhorst keeps involved as a kind of "elder statesman" for the group. Damhorst learned that hosting the smallest event a meal-packag- ing facilitator could help furnish would cost $6,000—more money than the six-student interfaith group had ever raised. Undaunted, Damhorst reached out to community and religious organizations and, by the time the event rolled around in April 2010, he had secured sufficient funds, including $300,000 from the Salvation Army World Service Office. In the end, 5,000 volunteers showed up to package more than 1 million meals for Haiti. Damhorst later spoke about his experience at the White House. The event showed what can happen at the intersection of pure te- nacity and a deep dedication to service—where Damhorst often resides. "One of the things that's really cool about Greg, and one of the things that motivates him in everything he does, is this true sense of compas- sion and empathy," says Adam Garner, vice president of Interfaith in Action and a U of I senior in philosophy who calls Damhorst a mentor. In college, Damhorst had planned on going to medical school and was interested in turning his focus to global health issues. "I wanted to be the kind of doctor that works to help people who are in the worst conditions, people who don't have access to the sort of stuff I can just walk down the road and access," Damhorst says. He didn't realize it at the time, but the work he was interested in was right down the street from his apartment. Admitted into the college's MD/PhD program but unsure of the direction his research might take, he visited the Urbana-Champaign campus' Micro and Nanotechnology Lab to meet with Rashid Bashir, PhD, a professor in bioengineering. Bashir told Damhorst about his lab's research to develop a porta- ble point-of-care device to test HIV/AIDS patients' CD4 T-cell counts, an important marker for monitoring the virus' progression. Testing requires large, expensive equipment and a professional trained to use it, and the project aims to develop a low-cost, user-friendly device so that patients in developing countries can access blood tests at local health clinics. Suddenly, everything coalesced for Damhorst. "That's what I want to work on," he told Bashir. Now in his second year in Bashir's lab, Dam- horst works in microfluidics to develop and perfect the device. With his adviser Bashir, Damhorst founded the Global Health Initiative with a grant from Focal Point, a Graduate College initiative that encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and research. In January, the Global Health Initiative took 19 students and faculty members to Ghana, where they got a firsthand view of the country's health care system. The group included seven MD/PhD students as well as chemists, bioengineers, a molecular physicist and a computer scientist. The trip gave Damhorst a taste of health care in a resource-limited setting. Scattered power outages, for example, demonstrated why the CD4 T-cell device had to be battery-powered. Learning that Ghanaians spend days traveling to health care facilities and waiting to be tested underscored the importance of the device's portability and ease of use. "Greg will be a very good physician because he's very compassion- ate and committed to contributing to society and to others who need help," Bashir says. "He also has excellent leadership and organizational skills, and the Global Health Initiative was one avenue where he could explore and demonstrate that, and he did it extremely well." Those values are also visible in Damhorst's interfaith work, which he says resonates with him because it bridges religious and cultural divides through a dedication to service. The success of the Haiti meal- packaging event made Interfaith in Action something of a legend among campus interfaith groups nationally and led Damhorst to found another student group, Illini Fighting Hunger, which has purchased the equip- ment to help organizations host their own meal-packaging events. He's also an EMT with the Champaign County Christian Health Center and during football season is a supervisor for Illini EMS, which provides emergency services at campus events. "I am constantly in awe of how much that man gets done on a daily basis," Garner says. "It makes me feel perpetually lazy." Damhorst does it all with the profound sense that he is here to serve others, a belief he says is rooted in his Christian faith but influenced by much more. He points to the tenet of Jainism, the Indian religion that preaches nonviolence, that serving others is the central purpose of humankind. "Souls render service to others," the dictum goes. "Through these experiences, I really understand it now," he says. "It actually means something. But it's become something that's really hard to articulate. It's almost as if, if I'm not doing something to help someone else, then what's the point?" 26 | FALL 2012

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