Freeman Fellows announced in Social Medicine

The Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School recently welcomed four fellows to its Freeman Foundation Chinese and Southeast Asian Fellowship and Cultural Exchange Program. The program, now in its fifth year (having resumed after a one-year sabbatical in 1999-00), aims to promote cross-cultural exchange and dialogue in the field of medical anthropology. Of the four Freeman Fellows, three come from China and one from Indonesia.

The Freeman Fellows

Laksono Trisnantoro, director of the Center for Health Service Management at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada University.

In 1992, Trisnantoro founded the master’s degree program in hospital and health service management at Gadjah Mada University, where he is also a member of the faculty of medicine. He holds a M.Sc. in health economics from the University of York, and attended the joint Ph.D. program in health policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the London School of Economics. Trisnantoro’s research interests pertain to the behavior of medical doctors and other health-care providers in the context of health-care policy and ethics. His wife, Ida Safitri Laksanawati, a pediatrician specializing in infectious disease, will join this year’s program as an honorary fellow.

Fan Jiang, assistant director of the department of administration at the Chinese Medical Association (CMA) in Beijing.

Jiang received his medical degree from the Capital University of Medical Sciences in Beijing, and has actively continued his medical education through a variety of programs and institutions. He intends to use the opportunities provided through the Freeman Fellowship and Harvard’s diverse resources to bring back to the CMA and the physicians of China the most current and comprehensive knowledge in the field of social medicine, particularly in the area of medical anthropology.

Ming Li, psychiatrist and director of the Suzhou Psychiatric Hospital in Suzhou, China.

In addition to practicing psychiatry, Li is active in hospital administration. Prior to assuming his current position in 1995, Li received his training in counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research interests focus on the analysis of health economics, and he hopes to transform public policy in China, specifically as it pertains to mental health insurance.

Shuiyuan Xiao, vice dean of the School of Public Health at Hunan Medical University in Changsha, China.

Xiao is also the co-director of the Psychological Consulting Center, and director of the department of social medicine at the Hunan Medical University. Since 1996 his principal research interest has been in the area of suicide and suicide prevention in his home community. During his year as a Freeman Fellow, Xiao plans to develop a proposal for suicide prevention in rural China.