In his Carolina office, above a collage of drawings by his three young children, Dr. Ross Boyce displays a 20-year-old photo of himself with 29 other soldiers. The photo captures a proud memory of U.S. Army service for the man who is now a leading epidemiologist and a research expert on diseases caused by ticks and mosquitoes.
“The infantry to academia path is not particularly common,” says Boyce ’12 (MD), an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a member of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases.
These days his duties include searching for solutions to malaria in Uganda, seeing patients in the UNC Infectious Diseases Clinic and studying a rare mosquito-borne disease in western North Carolina. But the memories — good and bad — from serving as the leader of this reconnaissance platoon during the Iraq War stick with him.
Read more of this story, published in The Well.