Griffin Barriss ’21 has found ways to collaborate with partners across the country and the globe for the common good.
A seven-hour bus ride can leave one with plenty of time to think. For Griffin Barriss ’21, those seven hours were enough to change the course of his Elon journey.
Barriss, a senior Honors Fellow, Global Ambassador and a die-hard four-year member of Elon’s Model United Nations Club, has always been drawn to global development. He first tapped into his global interests in a pair of courses during his first year at Elon. He fed his passion in an introduction to public health course taught by Senior Lecturer in Public Health Studies Amanda Tapler. He developed an interest in Indian independence, politics and religion in a South Asian politics course taught by Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies Jason Kirk. Two years later, he had the opportunity to combine those two passions into one hands-on experience in a new country.
In January 2019, Barriss and a group of Elon students set out for Jamkhed, India, as a part of Tapler’s annual Winter Term Public Health Practicum. Students spent several weeks getting firsthand experience in global public health. They worked with the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a non-governmental organization dedicated to supporting poor and marginalized communities, to confront the region’s public health issues. It was on the bus ride from Jamkhed to the Mumbai airport that Barriss realized his experience in India could translate into another meaningful opportunity at Elon. Barriss had set his sights on the university’s Lumen Prize, and there was no time to waste. “I immediately reached out to Professor Tapler,” he says. “We had just six weeks to go pedal to the metal.”
Just six weeks to prepare a proposal to be considered for the university’s most prestigious award supporting undergraduate research. No pressure. As rising juniors at Elon, Lumen Scholars receive a $20,000 award and the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor on a research project, which often culminates in conference presentations and publications. So, with little time to spare, Barriss needed a research topic. He wanted to dive deeper into the CRHP, its programs and its impact in India. Fortunately, the organization had just the opportunity.
CRHP leaders wanted to conduct peer-reviewed research on one of the organization’s key initiatives, the Adolescent Girls Program. The six-month program teaches Indian girls, ages 12 to 18, valuable lessons in health and social justice to inspire them to become agents of change in their communities. The CRHP had been unable to conduct its own research on the program due to a lack of time and resources, so Director Ravi Areole reached out to Tapler for help. Specifically, he wanted Barriss to lead the research. “I think that’s a really important piece to note because international global research can go wrong in many, many ways,” Tapler says. “And to have the director have a conversation and say, ‘I’d really like to work with Griffin on a new project,’ is special.”
With a topic secured and Tapler as his mentor, Barriss proved to the Lumen Prize selection committee that he had the knowledge, plan and passion for carrying out his research, earning him a place among the 15 members of Elon’s Lumen Scholar Class of 2019. The Lumen Prize funded Barriss and Tapler’s January 2020 return trip to Jamkhed, where the two began to collect data for the project. They worked closely with the CRHP research team to design questions and interview graduates about life after the program and their impact on their communities.
With the research well underway, Barriss returned home to Massachusetts and planned to again go back to Jamkhed over the summer to check in on progress. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic at its peak, traveling to India became impossible. Instead of working face to face with the CRHP in India, Barriss relied on phone calls and virtual meetings to continue his research, displaying resilience throughout. “He’s been amazing during a very stressful time for everybody,” Tapler says. “He’s been able to pivot during COVID-19 and continue the process. I think some students might not have handled it as calmly as Griffin did.”
Barriss continued to work closely with the CRHP over the summer, but with some unplanned free time, he found another way to promote public health — this time, at home in the United States. While in Massachusetts, Barriss took on a six-week internship with the nonprofit startup The Ventilator Project. The company launched in March 2020 to provide more cost-effective, scalable ventilators to hospitals facing shortages across the country.
The internship allowed Barriss to apply some of what he has learned at Elon to a real-world problem alongside hundreds of engineers and medical, regulatory and business professionals as they sought to protect patients from the effects of COVID-19. Although the pandemic upended Barriss’ original summer plans in India, the crisis served as a valuable lesson for the public health studies and international and global studies double major. “I think COVID-19 showed us and the world that we are a lot more interconnected than it seems,” Barriss says. “What started as a limited outbreak in rural China is now dictating how I go to class and see my friends. I think it strengthens the idea that collaboration across borders and working with international communities is not a waste of resources. We need to work together.”
In the face of the global pandemic, Barriss now has his sights set on completing his research and his final semester on campus. He hopes the experiences of the past four years are just the beginning of his future and the chance to make a positive impact around the world. As he continues his journey — he has been accepted into five Master of Public Health programs already — he will always remember the research experience and the seven-hour bus ride that set him on a course with endless possibilities. “Being selected as a Lumen Scholar was an incredible and humbling experience that has unlocked countless opportunities to reach my full potential,” he says.