Sudheesha chosen as commencement speaker at US Medical School
View(s):Sudheesha Perera, a student at Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League university in the US, had the rare privilege of being chosen as the speaker at the Commencement ceremony for the Warren Alpert Medical School’s Class of 2024.
He was selected by 131 fellow graduates to deliver remarks during Brown’s Commencement and Reunion Weekend recently. His address was titled “When Do We Become Doctors?”, described as fitting for a graduating medical student whose education timeline has been impacted not only by personal decisions, but also by world events.
Sudheesha Perera
The son of Dr. Santusht and Dr Sharmalie Perera, he says he always wanted to study medicine, and discovered along the way that he also wanted to learn, try and do many other things, including a full-time job in the financial sector, data science work in Thailand and a master of public health degree. Fortunately, being at student at Brown meant that he was able to engage with his wide-ranging interests and gain invaluable experience.
As part of the programme in Liberal Medical Education, in which students earn both a Brown bachelor’s degree and an M.D. from Warren Alpert Medical School in eight years of study, Perera developed a passion for mathematics and computer science. Upon graduating from Brown in 2017, he decided that instead of transitioning directly into medical school, he would move to New York City where he spent nearly two years working as a data engineer at a hedge fund.
In 2019, Perera returned to Providence to begin physician’s training at the Warren Alpert Medical School. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and classes shifted temporarily to remote instruction to protect students and faculty.
“Our med school experience was coloured by the pandemic and the post-pandemic period,” Perera said. “As medical students, we were managing changes to our curriculum, and as future physicians, we were watching, listening and trying to learn from how health care leaders responded to the evolving situation.”
Perera took a hiatus from Brown in 2022 to earn an MPH at Harvard, focusing on quantitative methods. And after finishing medical school classes, he travelled to Thailand to continue work he’d started in 2019 as part of a Data Science Institute grant with Neil Sarkar at Brown’s Center for Biomedical Informatics, aimed at expanding community-driven information systems at a reproductive health care clinic located near the border with Myanmar.
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