Graduate Speaks at Prestigious TEDMED Event

It may seem a long way from the Gates Mills campus to a position of invited speaker at the prestigious TEDMED conference at the Kennedy Center, but Dr. Jake Scott ’94, arrived April 11, 2012, and the audience received him with a standing ovation.
 

Jake, a radiation oncologist and cancer theoretician, gave his speech “Can We Stop the Imaginectomies” to an audience in the thousands, both at the Kennedy Center and as a sold-out simulcast, as a part of the start of TEDMED, the annual conference of intellectuals and iconoclasts “committed to catapulting medicine forward.” Jake joined a list of speakers that included leaders of the National Institutes of Health, American Red Cross and American Cancer Society.

 

Jake’s parents, Peter and Holly Scott, Upper School English teacher and Associate Director of Admissions, respectively, watched the simulcast at Case Western Reserve University Medical School. Jake graduated from Case’s School of Medicine in 2008.

 

“His talk, like his career,” Peter commented after the speech, “was all about taking risks, being willing to fail, and . . . challenging the tens of thousands of medical students listening to reach out to disciplines outside their own.”
 

Jake’s speech, with its themes of risk and the importance of collaborative work, began with a statement that his journey to the prestigious stage began on the Gates Mills campus, in “Bob Shurtz’s classrooms and in Cliff Walton’s wresting program.”

 

Read Jake's bio on TEDMED's website, and a reference in this medGadget blog.