Stephen Lockhart
Missouri & Exeter 1977
Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1958, Stephen Lockhart attended Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in mathematics, before going to Oxford to read for the MPhil in Economics. He returned to the US and took his PhD and his MD from Cornell University. He went on to practise as an anaesthesiologist and became Chief Medical Officer at Sutter Health, working to improve healthcare provision with a particular focus on health equity. He has also volunteered in healthcare projects in South America and in Haiti. Now retired, Lockhart continues to be involved in philanthropic work across educational and environmental causes and has also served as member of selection committees for the Rhodes Scholarship. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 27 March 2024.
‘My mother was the most influential person in my life’
In St. Louis at the time I was growing up, race was very much a defining component of our culture. Schools, neighbourhoods, churches, were all segregated, legally. Our family always had a couple of core values. One was education, and even my grandmother, who was born in 1890, eventually got a graduate education, which was very rare for a black woman at that time. The other was music, and there was an expectation that everyone in the family would study and take up an instrument.
I was raised by my mom, who was a single mom. She was the most influential person in my life and still is, even though she passed away 20 years ago now. She was both a mathematician and an activist, and she was very involved in the civil rights movements. I went to rallies with her and grew up reading books like The Black Panthers by Gene Marine or Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Her brother, my uncle, was a Black Panther and we were very much steeped in the political ideology of the time.
Her love of mathematics was also really important in my life. She had a graduate degree in mathematics, but at the time, as a black woman, she could not get a job in higher education in mathematics, and it was only around the time I was starting college that she was able to become a math professor. She was very interested in having me learn math and that meant that I could do arithmetic and algebra almost before I started school, because she and I just did it all the time. She made it really fun and interesting, and so, I got to enjoy it a lot.
I wouldn’t say that we were a poor family, because that might imply poverty of the soul, whereas when it came to education, music and so on, I feel like I was one of the richest kids on earth, but it was certainly true that we had no money. So, I went to Washington University on an Arthur Holly Compton Fellowship. Compton was a Nobel prize-winning physicist, and I was effectively recruited as a mathlete. I had skipped some grades in school, which meant I started university when I was only 15. That created both challenges and opportunities, and the great gift I had was making friends who really more like big brothers and sisters for me. It’s such a great university, and my time there was magical.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
Alongside mathematics, I was also very interested in medicine. When I was around 11 years old, my mother suffered a cerebral aneurysm rupture, and the doctor who took care of her was an amazing man. He knew the importance of my relationship to my mother, and rather than not telling me anything and having me be totally frightened, he brought me in and showed me what was going on. So, that made me want to be a doctor, but when I graduated college at 18, it was clear, even to me, that I didn’t have the level of maturity necessary to go into medical school at that point. The path of least resistance would have been for me to stay at Washington University and do a master’s in mathematics, but the dean suggested I should apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. He made it clear that he didn’t think I would get it, but he thought the interviews would be good practice for the ones I’d eventually need to do for medical school. That meant I went into the whole process feeling very relaxed. I remember being asked in my interview about something that was very pointed and racially controversial, and it was offensive to me, and so, I just lit into the interviewer, although I did it respectfully. Afterwards, he came up to me and said, ‘I hope you didn’t think that’s what I really thought. I needed to poke you. We could see your academic qualifications, but we needed to know, are you just this nerdy kid who does well in school, or do you actually have a social conscience?’
'It challenged me a lot’
I’d originally intended to study mathematics at Oxford, but then I started to think about how I could use the opportunity of the Scholarship to make a difference in the world. I was very interested in how healthcare is provided, and the NHS in England provided an amazing model. I decided to shift into studying economics so that I could understand more about how healthcare was run. That challenged me a lot, but we had superb tutors – several who went on to win the Nobel Prize – and I was able to work on a mathematical analysis of hospital waiting lists using queueing theory to try to work out how you can optimise or reduce them.
In many ways, the experiences that had the greatest impact on me at Oxford were the non-academic ones. In the JCR and the MCR I was able to meet and have conversations with people from all kinds of different countries and backgrounds and I learned a lot. I made good friends, and that exposure to a different culture, different food, even differences in language, was invaluable. I rowed for my college, I was in a band, and I also had the chance to travel, especially within England itself. By the time I left, I felt like I had had a lifetime of experiences.
‘I wanted to build something that would last longer than my brief span here’
Back in the US, I took up a subsidised programme for doing a medical degree alongside a PhD. Medical schools have a reputation for being highly pressured, but Cornell was so supportive. I did my PhD in biostatistics, finding new ways to measure and evaluate clinical trials for cancer. It was an intellectually rewarding process, but also emotionally as well, in that you were really dealing with people’s lives. I feel very proud of that work, because it showed how nerdy math stuff can actually translate to having a better impact on patients.
Alongside that, I started the clinical training programme. I went to the University of California San Francisco to do my residency in anaesthesiology, and I also did two fellowships there and spent several years on the faculty. Moving into Sutter Health gave me the chance to have many different careers within one organisation. I started out as a practising anaesthesiologist, and I loved every moment of it, every patient. It felt like a real gift and an honour to be able to do that. But then, at some point, again, I became interested in thinking about how care is provided. I took on a number of roles and, as Chief Medical Officer, I was able to really make some headway in tackling the challenges around providing quality care and equitable healthcare. By ‘Equitable,’ I mean the same outcomes, as opposed to just treating everybody the same way. Before I retired, I created the Sutter Health Institute for Advancing Health Equity, which is a think tank dedicated to working on the problems of trying to get equitable care. It’s still going, and that’s what I really wanted, to build something that would last longer than my brief span here.
‘It’s a chance to be non-linear’
Like all of the other educational opportunities I’ve had in my life, the Rhodes Scholarship was the result of philanthropy. My wife, Karen, and I do a lot to support education and work on the environment, and we do that in large part as a way to give back following the opportunities that we were given because of philanthropy. For me, the Rhodes Scholarship was life-changing, for sure. I think it’s so important for the Scholarship to continue to be around. That means that it also has to have the ability to adapt and to change, so that it will still have a meaningful purpose long into the future.
To current and future Rhodes Scholars, I would say that getting the Scholarship is an amazing opportunity. Enjoy it. It’s a chance to challenge your basic assumptions about life, about other people, about the world. So, be open to that, to meeting new people, new ideas. And it’s kind of a freebie, right? A couple of years where you can just go and do this and then, press reset. So, it doesn’t have to fit in and make sense. You know, it’s a chance to be non-linear, to break that line – jog left, jog right – before you come back.