Dr. Shaun Odell earned the Honored Russian Alumnus award for his global work in neonatology.
PROVO, Utah (Oct. 25, 2018)—This year the Honored Russian Alumnus award was given to the neonatologist and Russian alumnus, Dr. Shaun Odell. While presenting the award, Dr. Mark Purves, head of the Russian department, remarked, “My job requires me to give Ds and Cs; Dr. Odell saves infants.”
Odell earned his bachelor’s degree at BYU in microbiology and Russian and continued his studies at the University of Chicago. He went on to complete an internship and residency at Dartmouth College and is now the medical director of the American Fork neonatal intensive care unit. While Odell has built a successful medical career throughout his life, he has still managed to find a place for his Russian interests and talents.
An interest in Russia began for Odell when he was a child at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. Seeing images of Russia on television and in newspapers led him to develop a fascination with Russian culture, which culminated in his decision to go to Moscow as a foreign exchange student in 1996. Odell’s Russian journey continued as he served a LDS mission in Yekaterinburg, Russia and as he went on to study Russian at BYU. Of his Russian education, Odell explained, “I came in with a cultural understanding from my mission, but the opportunity I had here [at BYU] enriched and broadened what I knew about Russian literature and art and its effect on the history of the world.”
Despite his engaging experience studying Russian, Odell (like many other Russian majors) found it difficult to find a use for Russian in conjunction with his other studies and interests. “I became worried that when I finished here, when I left and went on to go to med school, that [it] might be the end [of my Russian studies],” Odell said. “I worried I would lose the language skills, and I worried how I would use that skill set that I’d cultivated over many years. That [fear] turned out to be completely unfounded.”
In spite of these fears, Odell found multiple opportunities to integrate his medical studies with his love for Russian. The first of such opportunities was while Odell was still at BYU: In 2000 he participated in a research group that was attempting to collect DNA in order to create a genetic map of the world. Odell was able to travel to Russia to collect a few DNA samples. He commented, “This was my first inkling that regardless of what you go into, there’s a lot of opportunities to use your Russian skills outside of the university, outside of the Russian program.”
After returning from this genetic research project in Russia, Odell began medical school and took an interest in neonatology, which is the care of infants who are born either at risk or very early. Often these infants have congenital abnormalities, such as heart defects. Odell learned that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints runs a humanitarian program to train doctors on neonatal resuscitation and other infant life support skills (Read more here). From here, Odell connected with the Helping Babies Breathe program, which teaches medical providers in developing countries to care for babies. “The people [in this program] were thrilled there existed a neonatologist who could speak Russian,” Odell said. Language had always been a barrier to getting training into many developing areas of the former Soviet Union where the rates of neonatal death were high. Odell noted, “This is something I never would have guessed as I was planning out my future, but it led to several opportunities.”
Odell first traveled to Belarus to conduct infant care trainings to groups of doctors, nurses, and midwives. Between 2013 and 2018, he traveled to Belarus six times and conducted trainings in all the provinces in the country, reaching a total of about one hundred medical providers in each province. These providers were tasked with teaching others about infant care and in the course of one year, they taught a thousand more people. “As far as we can tell,” Odell said, “the program has been a success.”
Spurred on by the success in Belarus, Odell traveled to Tajikistan and Ghana. In Ghana he met a physician who had studied in Russia. “Going to Africa,” Odell said, “you’d never expect to use those Russian skills, and yet, there it was.” Again, he emphasized, “Whatever you decide to go into . . . there will be a lot of unexpected opportunities to use your Russian that you would never have dreamed of.”
Finally, during the summer of 2018, Odell returned to his mission area of Yekaterinburg, Russia to teach medical providers from all over the country about neonatal care. He remarked, “The Russian community you participate in now, [which includes] your professors, people from the mission, your classmates . . . will persist throughout your life. No matter how crazy life gets, you can find Russian experiences.”
*Xирург means surgeon in Russian. This headline refers to a popular Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time.
-Cristiana Farnsworth (European Studies and Russian, ’20)