Stephen Freeman, a 2024 Pisacano Scholar, is a 4^th-year MD-MPH student at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

Stephen was born and raised in Northville, Michigan, and is a proud Midwesterner. Growing up, his experiences within his community strongly shaped his commitment to community-centered medicine and his desire to pursue family medicine. During the Flint Water Crisis, Stephen volunteered with the Forgotten Harvest Food Bank, working alongside fellow southeast Michiganders to grow large plots of spinach and collard greens. Since then, these plots have continued to supply residents living in food deserts in Flint with edible medicine, as the high iron and calcium content in these plants help protect against lead poisoning.

In medical school, Stephen has built on this experience as he explored how to integrate community initiatives into patient care. As a co-director of his school’s chapter of Walk with a Future Doc (WWAFD), Stephen partnered with the Chicago Parks Foundation to lead weekly walks and health-talks to help local Chicagoans get active. In this role, he also led a project that connected patients receiving physical activity counseling at a Northwestern primary care clinic to the WWAFD program and other free community resources. Through this project, Stephen had the unique opportunity to walk alongside some of his own patients and be a part of their first steps towards lifestyle change. As a future family doctor, Stephen hopes to be a leader in rethinking how physicians create and integrate community into patient care.

Stephen is also a passionate educator, discovering his passion for teaching in college. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2021 with a degree in chemical and physical biology. During this time, Stephen served as a co-coordinator for Peer Health Exchange – a program to deliver comprehensive health education to high school students in under-resourced communities in Boston – as well as a teaching fellow for undergraduate courses in chemistry and quantum mechanics.

Stephen hopes to use his teaching experiences to enhance patient education. As a 2023 American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Emerging Leader Institute scholar, Stephen led an interdisciplinary team to create MediSimplify. MediSimplify is a new, AI-based platform that allows doctors to simplify patient education materials to meet national health literacy standards in a matter of seconds. His passion for health literacy and patient education is also reflected in his work promoting organizational health literacy as part of the Health Literacy Initiative at the Cook County Department of Public Health and his involvement with the Wallia Laboratory, where he has helped develop a low-cost, diabetes education toolkit for patients newly prescribed insulin.

In his free time, Stephen loves to play tennis, ice skate, and, most recently, dance Salsa Rueda – a Cuban style of dance done in a large circle. He is still an avid reader of books by Rick Riordan (author of the Percy Jackson series) and other fantasy or dystopian novels. Stephen also enjoys hosting weekly dinners with his friends to try out new recipes, including their biggest hit so far– seitan, carne asada tacos.