Brown medical student Juan Vasquez takes information from Enelsa Jaime at the Rhode Island Free Clinic, where he volunteers under the school’s Scholarly Concentrations Program.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez Ruben W. Perez

Juan C. Vasquez wants to learn, but he also wants to act — to fix things.

The 23-year-old medical student is studying why asthma is more prevalent and more severe among Latino children. But not just to know, although knowing is important. He wants to advocate for a better life for those children.

As research assistant to a Brown professor, Vasquez is spending the summer between his first and second years at Brown’s medical school documenting the asthma incidence among Latinos and learning about their lives. He’s also volunteering at the Rhode Island Free Clinic, seeking to immerse himself in the community, to see firsthand what happens when people don’t have health insurance.

It’s not unusual for Brown students to do such work. But now, for the first time, they can call it homework — part of their formal education, in addition to all the facts that medical students must master.

Vasquez is among the first 41 participants in a new, optional enhancement to the Warren Alpert Medical School curriculum, called the Scholarly Concentrations Program. The program channels students’ passions into a scholarly endeavor guided by a faculty mentor and recognized with academic credit.

Margret Chang, another medical student who opted for the program, just got back from Cambodia, where she collected traditional music and stories.

“Cultural preservation of that sort is crucial to health and well-being,” said Chang, 24, who has an interest in the health of refugees. Chang is incorporating what she learned in Cambodia into a recording, a kind of parable with music, to help Cambodian refugees cope with their traumatic memories and improve their health.

Other student projects this summer include: using GPS technology to help a city in Mongolia decide where to locate a new trauma center; studying nutrition in homeless people in Providence; devising ways to incorporate care of the aging into the medical school curriculum; and surveying sex workers in Shanghai to understand the spread of HIV and other diseases.

The Scholarly Concentrations Program is the brainchild of Dr. Philip A. Gruppuso, a pediatrician, researcher and longtime Brown faculty member who was appointed dean for medical education in 2005, with a charge to reform the curriculum.

In thinking about the curriculum, Gruppuso compared medical students to Ph.D. candidates. To get a Ph.D., you have to be creative, doing original research and writing a dissertation. Medical students, in contrast, risk squelching creativity with the massive amount of knowledge they must acquire. Gruppuso understands how creative pursuits complement scientific thinking, especially for doctors; he had studied music composition as an undergraduate and today plays piano in a blues band.

“Some of the skills that physicians need to have, like communication skills, are enhanced by having a broader education than just knowing the facts,” Gruppuso said.

When the medical school introduced Scholarly Concentrations, Gruppuso expected that maybe 15 students would volunteer. But knowing what Brown students are like — self-starters engaged with social issues — he wasn’t shocked that nearly half the 92 students in the first-year medical school class signed up.

Each student chose one of 10 designated areas of concentration, such as Advocacy and Activism, Contemplative Studies (combining philosophy and neuroscience), Women’s Reproductive Health, Freedom and Rights, and — the most popular —– Global Health.

They connected with a faculty member and developed a research project for the summer between their first and second years of medical school (the only summer when clinical work is not required). Throughout the next three years, students will continue working on their topic, through seminars and projects, and at the end of four years produce a “scholarly product” — perhaps a book or published journal article, development of a new curriculum model, or creation of a device or computer program.

This work comes on top of the regular curriculum, which students must pass to stay in the program. “There’s no opportunity for students to neglect the core material,” Gruppuso said. “They need to pass their courses. They need to pass licensure exams.”

Seven other medical schools — including Duke, Stanford and Baylor — offer similar experiences outside the traditional curriculum, but Brown’s program differs in the breadth and flexibility of its approach.

“Brown’s is unique in its focus on cross-disciplinary content. It’s not pediatrics or orthopedics,” said Emily Rickards, the program manager. “It goes with Brown’s institutional values of student choice and self-directed learning.”

Many students arrive at Brown with well-developed interests and commitments to volunteer work, Rickards said. The program allows them pursue such activities in a more structured, scholarly way. It also cements a relationship with a faculty mentor.

Vasquez, for example, started working on the asthma research project before he even came to Brown — during the summers while he was an undergraduate at Harvard.

Vasquez is from Pawtucket, the first American-born child in a family of Colombian immigrants, and his parents, a janitor and office worker, still live in the Pawtucket house where he grew up. He wanted to come home for the summer, and looking for work online, he found that Dr. Gregory Fritz, medical director of Bradley Hospital and a Brown faculty member, was looking for a research assistant on the asthma project.

After he enrolled at Brown and decided to participate in the Scholarly Concentrations Program, Vasquez asked Fritz to serve as his faculty adviser in the concentration. Until Vasquez approached him, Fritz had not heard anything about Scholarly Concentrations. And he knew he wasn’t going to get any extra pay for doing this. But he jumped at the chance.

“I didn’t feel it as a burden because I like doing that. Especially for somebody like Juan,” Fritz said. “I think of myself as a mentor for him. I consider that a joyful part of what I do as a faculty member.”

Fritz also considers it a good deal. “On one hand, he’s learning. On the other hand because of his Latino background he’s also helpful in teaching us,” Fritz said. “He’s very smart and a delightful person. And he works really hard.”

Fritz, who serves on the board of Rhode Island Kids Count and is active in children’s mental-health advocacy, expects to connect Vasquez with other advocacy projects.

“This summer, I’m doing the research, learning about public health research, with the goal of using that research as a foundation for advocacy and activism,” Vasquez said. “As advocates and activists, we don’t want to be involved in an academic setting without knowing the community.”

Vasquez thinks he’ll probably specialize in pediatrics. He plans, when his training is complete, to come home to practice among Latinos in Pawtucket, Providence or Central Falls — where he expects that being a good doctor will include advocating for his patients in many ways.

ffreyer@projo.com