Student Profile: Rohan Badlani

After his parents immigrated from Mumbai, India, third-year student Rohan Badlani was born in Florida and raised in Miami—where people from all over the Western Hemisphere have flocked. “I’ve always been interested in interacting with people from different backgrounds,” says the summa cum laude University of Miami graduate.

That is why Badlani is participating in the School of Medicine’s Global Medicine Program. During the summer of 2017, Badlani joined one Temple resident and eight other students for three weeks at the Jubilee Mission Medical College Hospital and Research Institute in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala.

“It’s a pretty unique opportunity to have faculty in another country show you how they do things,” he says. Some of the differences Badlani observed involved doing more with less—more ultrasounds than more expensive CT scans, for example. They also were introduced to a Smile Clinic for children with cleft lips and learned how to treat snake bites, which are quite common in Kerala.

“Learning different techniques and experiencing diseases and conditions you might not see much here, such as the snake bites, makes you a better physician,” he says. “And surrounding yourself with different types of people humanizes others and increases your ability to empathize—and that’s the goal, to become a more caring person and doctor.”