Gareth Forde:
Seeking solutions

Gareth Forde is no stranger to hurdles. He cleared them when he ran for his high school and college track teams, and he helped others do the same when he coached track at Jackson State University in Mississippi. He’s doing it again with the pipeline project he and classmate Matthew Fitzpatrick launched at the Medical School.

Forde helped gather more than 50 people from the University, Mayo Clinic, other medical organizations, public schools, community groups, and local businesses and corporations. Their task: to come up with answers to the dual problem of inequitable health care and socioeconomic barriers to medical school for students from underserved populations.

At the end of the day there was a solution: the pipeline project, an initiative to improve the health of underserved populations by creating a more diverse health-care workforce in Minnesota. The project, supported by the University's Medical School, the Mayo Medical School, and the Minnesota Medical Association, calls for equipping students from underserved, rural, and ethnically diverse groups with the tools they need to gain acceptance to medical school and to succeed once they're enrolled.

"Gareth presented evidence from the literature on the characteristics of the pipeline program that would work," says Kathleen Watson, M.D., associate dean for students and student learning at the Medical School. "He's a natural collaborator, a natural convener, but he's also very scholarly. He uses those skills not just for medicine but to research socioeconomic policies."

Forde, who is married and has two young children, says his family helps him to find balance and keep his work in perspective. "In every decision, I really have to think about the consequences it has on my family," says Forde, who plans to become a trauma surgeon.

That path will offer challenges very different from the socioeconomic ones he's tackling with the pipeline project, but Forde says life's challenges all have something in common: They demand flexibility and problem-solving—and the courage to step into the unknown.

"I see a problem, I start working on a solution," says Forde. "Studying the problem is not enough. You can over-study; you can paralyze yourself. You have to take off—test  your wings."

Matthew Fitzpatrick:
Making connections

Copilot on the pipeline project, Matthew Fitzpatrick was identified by Forde as the ideal person to help him realize the initiative when they were first-year medical students.

"He got it," says Forde. "He wanted to do it for the right reasons."

Those reasons are evident in the choices Fitzpatrick has made in life. While his degrees in psychology, public health, and theology might suggest a young man in search of direction, each course of study has helped to shape Fitzpatrick's character—and his approach to medicine.

"Matt has a sense of quiet outrage, a sense of gentleness," says Watson. "And this may be the best quality of a leader: He is tenacious. When something doesn't work, he explores other possibilities. He is convinced that medicine can—and should—be provided judiciously and fairly to everyone."

Fitzpatrick didn't decide to go to medical school until he was 29. By then, he'd already done a lot of living—and studying. After getting his master's degree in theology from Notre Dame and "realizing there wasn't much of a market for religious studies," he worked for two years in the Middle East's West Bank and Gaza Strip, writing grants and working on educational publications for health-care clinics throughout the region.

"[That experience] exposed me to different worldviews and opinions, and to how people have made sense of suffering in their lives and of their place in the world," Fitzpatrick says.

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