Taking the Road Less Traveled

Reed Flora was once on a 10-year track to become a partner at a prestigious accounting firm in Downtown Chicago.

But after volunteering at Kids' Club, an after-school program in Cabrini-Green, one of the most notorious housing projects in the U.S., Flora felt a spark he hadn't experienced during his days of meetings, spreadsheets and monotony at the firm.

“The extent of their poverty and the starkness of the environment in which they lived were startling,” Flora said. “My heart has always been drawn to children that are suffering and in need as they have little or no control over their circumstances.”

Flora, originally from Austin, chose to leave his lucrative accounting job and pursue a new career in emergency or pediatric medicine to assist people in meeting their most essential needs health and life.

Flora, now a second-year medical student at the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine, and recipient of a Beyond Borders, Beyond Measure scholarship from the Office of International Affairs, is spending his summer with eight other medical students conducting research focusing on poverty and disease in Bangladesh, a third-world country in South Asia.

Flora, Jarad Peranteau, Josh Reber, Ryan Hassan, Cindy Tsai, Chris Trautman, Brenton Francisco, Andrew Matthys and Julie Estrada-Ledford will perform most of their research at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, a training hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Dhaka is one of the most densely populated and poorest cities in the world.

The students are assisting Jena Derakhshani Hamadani, Ph.D., a scientist at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research and head of the hospital's Child Development Unit. Hamadni's research is an ongoing project to improve the overall nutrition of undernourished children in the slums of Dhaka.