UNBC researcher appointed to Royal Society’s new scholar group
Social scientist brings perspective to Northern Medical Program
Dr. Sarah de Leeuw is a unique academic — a poet with a doctorate in the humanities who teaches in the Northern Medical Program at the University of Northern B.C.
She’s also one of 70 academics, including 10 in B.C., appointed to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, a prestigious honour recognizing the achievements of the emerging generation of scholarly, scientific and artistic leadership in Canada.
“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said de Leeuw. “It was enough of an honour to be chosen out of UNBC, but to actually have a college of your peers from coast-tocoast-tocoast choose me, it’s hard to put into words. It’s extraordinarily flattering.”
By training, de Leeuw is a cultural geographer with a social science Ph.D. and an author whose book Where It Hurts, a collection of personal essays set in northern B.C., was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award in non-fiction.
Her work is at the crossroads where creative arts, humanities and medical science meets. She’s in health care, with a focus on rural health and Indigenous communities, but looks at issues through a broader, artistic, human lens.
Arts and science may seem like contradictory or discrete fields, but they’re not, said de Leeuw: “For people outside medicine, we understand intuitively that we want our humanity to be recognized as much as we want to be served by excellent bio-scientific research.”
She used the example of her father, who died last year.
“I wanted him to have the best bio-medical science services, but I also wanted my dad’s story and his family and his heart and soul to never be forgotten in that picture.”
In 2007, de Leeuw was the first person from the humanities hired as faculty for the Northern Medical Program, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine delivered in partnership with UNBC. She’s part of an increasing trend, though still rare in North America, of integrating people from social sciences backgrounds into the faculty of medicine.
De Leeuw’s research interests are influenced by her life growing up in remote parts of northern B.C., including Haida Gwaii and Terrace.
It was the call of home that drew her back to B.C. after completing her Ph.D. at Queen’s University in 2006.
She was two days away from accepting a teaching position in the geography department at a university in Ontario when she got a call from UBC’s Faculty of Medicine about a job opening in the Northern Medical Program.
“I actually thought they had the wrong number. ‘My last name is hard to pronounce,’ ” she told them. “Maybe you’re looking for another Sarah.”
In the end, it was a no-brainer. The choices were: “Yes, I could lecture in big undergraduate courses in geography to people who will become wonderful map makers and city planners, or I could try to train future physicians to have heart and humanity in dealing with people like my dad,’” she said. “That’s what it really came down to.”
De Leeuw, who teaches both undergraduates and postgraduate students, now splits her time between Prince George and Kelowna.
Her vision is to alleviate health inequalities in B.C. “It sounds grandiose but I would like a more equitable distribution of wellness in the province, no matter where you live or what family you’re born into,” she said.
“I think Canadians believe in equity and in the equal distribution of wellness and access to services that would make us well,” she added.
“I really believe the arts and the humanities have a role in the future of that possibility.”