HMS Professor Snags $100K Award

Presley Professor of Social Medicine Paul Farmer was awarded the $100,000 Austin College Leadership Award last night in honor of his humanitarian work in medicine.

A founding director of Partners in Health (PIH), a medical charity with offices around the world, Farmer was presented the honor at the Belo Mansion in Dallas, Texas. He will use the money to help make up for disparities in the organization’s budget, PIH spokesman Andrew Marx said.

Farmer’s method of treating patients with multi-variable tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, developed during his time at PIH, revolutionized the approach to the diseases in the public health profession, putting patient care before cost, according to Arthur Kleinman, Rabb professor of anthropology and Farmer’s adviser in social and cultural anthropology at Harvard.

It is this strategy of “doing global health from a social medicine perspective” which illustrates the “genius” of Farmer and PIH, Kleinman said. But the technique is expensive, he added.

“Partners in Health’s budget has grown at a remarkable pace,” Marx said. “But the demand for—the need for—the kind of work we do is almost infinite.” He pointed to a $20 million disparity between the organization’s requested and actual budget.

PIH was founded 20 years ago based off work that Farmer, then a joint medicine and anthropology student, had done providing free medical treatment to the poverty-stricken residents of rural Haiti.

“The patients are the heart and soul of the operation. Often, once they’ve gotten better, we train and employ them,” Marx said, adding that the Farmer, who spends more of his time abroad with PIH than he does in Cambridge, plays an active role in training these employees.

Kleinman said Farmer’s commitment to combining medicine and public service predated his professional work.

“When Paul was a sophomore at Duke, he wrote to me and basically said, ‘I want to be a medical anthropologist like you,’” said Kleinman, adding that Farmer was a “serious correspondent.”

“I have a real sense with Paul of passing the torch, only that torch has burned brighter in his hands than it did mine,” he said of Farmer’s accomplishments.

Kleinman described Farmer as “a wonderful fundraiser.”

“It’s hard if you have a moral commitment to social justice to hear Paul speak and not want to make some sort of contribution,” he said.

Farmer, also a winner of the MacArthur ‘genius’ award, joins the ranks of Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach For America as a senior at Princeton and who won the two-year-old award last February.

“Dr. Paul Farmer, is a hero here,” said Pete DeLisle, director of Austin College’s Posey Leadership Institute, which partners with the college to deliver the award, “we’re very proud to be associated with him.”

Farmer was travelling to receive the prize and could not be reached for comment yesterday.