Pre-Health Advisor

We know the importance of Physics being a recommended pre-requisite course for most Pre-Health Professions but do we know the true importance of physics in relation to healthcare and society? Pre-Health Coordinator, Carmen Gamlin was able to receive some insight on the role of Physics in the health sciences and how science and society relate to one another from Detroit Mercy’s Dr. Prasad Venugopal, Associate Professor of Physics. Here are the highlights of their interview.

I think it’s very important for us to understand the history of science and how science and society intersect because if you’re going to be a doctor or a dentist or a researcher, biomedical researcher, what you’re dealing with is people and societies and nature and it’s very important for us to understand the sacredness of that.

• Why is Physics so important for Pre-Health Students?

It’s the course that it’s very typical that most of our Bio and Biochem majors take one physics course as part of the requirements for their major…And for the longest time physicist, physic teachers have not done a great job of making physics meaningful to our students and so that’s been a challenge and I’m part of communities within the physics, within the larger physics world that is really looking at how do we make these courses more meaningful for our pre-health, pre dent students, for these biology majors and biochem majors.

The first way really goes to the basics and that is one of the most celebrated theories in biology and in nature in fact is the concept of evolution. We all evolve, nature evolves. And what’s an exact evolution that produces the diversity of the natural world and of the human world that we see it. I mean, we look around us, if you cannot but be amazed by how amazing nature is, how diverse it is…Biology does a good job with talking about diversity. Teaching evolution is talking about diversity but physics has a wonderful role to play in it because physics is the study of nature and trying to understand the ways in which nature works. So what physics brings to study of nature is that the laws of evolution as we know as Darwin and others put forward, are constrained by the laws of physics. So evolution is constrained by physics.

My dental students learn that the material of the gums and the material of the teeth have very specific properties. They understand that bones have properties that differ with age. They understand the physics of osteoporosis…So I teach them; I make it relevant to them by teaching them about how physics is so important to an understanding of the carriers they’re going into as doctors or dentist, or graduate students in medicine…I like them to see that the biology and biochemistry they’ve been learning is informed by the physics I’m teaching them.

• Dr. Venugopal talks about the learning community Science, Technology and Race!

I can just start out by saying we have a lot of fun in this group and we do a lot of things together. We are serious, but also have fun. So what is this about? The idea for the community came from a course that I teach called Science, Technology and Race and that brings me actually to the second part of the answer for why physics is important and the important part of teaching physics for pre health students and that is; I think it’s very important for us to understand the history of science and how science and society intersect because if you’re going to be a doctor or a dentist or a researcher, biomedical researcher, what you’re dealing with is people and societies and nature and it’s very important for us to understand the sacredness of that. You know, people are sacred. Nature is sacred.

I want my students to understand that physics is meaningful for their lives, identities, their dreams and their hopes. But that is I have to teach physics that is relevant to people. And so it’s something that I’ve been trying to do in my physics classes, but in the meantime I found a way to do it and I developed a course called Science, Technology and Race where we talk about the history of science and technology and how it intersects with the question of race. And we also talk about gender in that class so that my students can understand that they’re not just scientists, but they’re also social beings, and it’s possible for us to do science that is anti-racist, that is very democratic science. That is a science for everybody not just a few corporations or for a few people making money.

So that is why I developed the course and it’s been quite successful. I’ve enjoyed teaching it and so when I had an opportunity, I started this learning community because I wanted to continue the conversation outside the classroom and the learning community was like a great way to continue that conversation because I knew that I needed to learn more.

I felt I needed a community of people who shared with me the idea of talking about issues of race openly without fear. Honestly, in particular for me, the connection to science and technology is important, but I also recognize that people come in with things they want to learn about and they want to talk about and so learning community really discusses race in so many different ways.

• Literature and Physics?! You have Literature in your Physics Class? 

Physics sometimes can feel very dry and so removed from society and that’s the fault of the physicist, by the way and the scientists in general. But physicist, particularly that we pretend somehow that the physics that we teach and that we learn is doesn’t matter which society you’re in or what your station in life is or what your life experience are; the physics is the same and that’s not true. So what I did this past semester, in the middle of the pandemic of all things, I told my students we’re going to read a book.

Dr. Venugopal states that when he presented to his class that they will be reading a book along with their textbook, his students had some groans and  just wanted to get through the Physics course. However, he had particular goals for his class and wanted his students to have a better understanding of physics.

I think what is really important about what we’re going to do is we’re going to understand how physics is being used in the real world, not in an abstract form, but how people, how people’s culture, their background, where they live, the beliefs that they have, how all of those things influence how physics influence their life and how they use physics to better their lives…So I had them read a book called “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.”