Adam and Carol Iddriss

Growing up in Pittsburgh—a few miles from the university they would both go on to attend—Adam Iddriss and his older brother, Jamel, always knew what gifts they would be getting for Christmas.

Books.

“That’s not saying they didn’t get their toys and Nintendos, too, like their friends got. Just not at Christmas,” explains their mother, Carol Iddriss, who manages the information desk in Pitt’s William Pitt Union.

“Christmas is supposed to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” she says. “It’s been so commercialized, but I refused to play into that. I didn’t want my boys becoming materialistic, and I also wanted them to stretch themselves intellectually. So, on Christmas and on their birthdays, Adam and Jamel would each get three or four individually wrapped books—history books, science books, art books—geared to their reading level at the time.”

At least one of those books would help change Adam’s life.

“It was Gifted Hands, the autobiography of Ben Carson, who is the director of the pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins University,” says Adam, a University Honors College junior studying bioengineering and chemistry, who recently was named a 2006 Harry S. Truman Scholarship winner for his outstanding academic and leadership abilities. See story in the April 10 Pitt Chronicle, available at here.

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (Zondervan, 1990), by Benjamin S. Carson and Cecil Murphy, is the success story of an inner-city Detroit youth who—inspired by his religious faith and challenged by his mother to strive for excellence—overcame poverty, a violent temper, and a childhood self-image as a low-achieving “dummy” to become a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon. Carson captured international media attention in 1987 by successfully separating conjoined twins who shared a portion of the same brain. A decade later, he led a South African medical team in the first successful separation of twins joined at the head but facing in opposite directions.

“I remember reading Gifted Hands when I was little. It was really an inspirational book for me, and Ben Carson was a great role model,” says Adam, who today is tall, athletic, and visibly more comfortable talking about the achievements of Carson (or anyone else) than his own.

“My mom always tried to acculturate my brother and me with positive African American role models—positive role models in general, actually—who were able to accomplish great things, whether it be in medicine or law or any other realm,” Adam says.

Today, Adam’s goals are to earn M.D. and Ph.D. degrees and then work as a bioengineer and physician dedicated to patient care, biomedical research in tissue engineering, and advocacy work for minorities in science.

Like his love of books, public service and internationalism were instilled in Adam as a child.

He grew up savoring such West African foods as “fufu” (cassava-pounded dough) and “red-red” (plantains and black-eyed peas). During family meals, Adam’s father, who immigrated to the United States from Ghana, would give him and Jamel lessons in Ghanaian history and language. The family visited Accra, Ghana’s capital, where Adam met his paternal grandparents and other relatives.

“Adam saw at an early age how his relatives over there lived. He met people who had no shoes,” Carol Iddriss points out. “So, it’s not like he grew up thinking, ‘Gee, I’m underprivileged because the neighborhood where I grew up isn’t as well-off as, say, Fox Chapel.’

“The fact is, we raised Adam to view the whole world as his home and his classroom. I’d tell him, ‘You’re just living in one small dot on the map, and you have to make a difference. If you meet someone who doesn’t have shoes, you give them yours, or at least a pair of your old shoes. You volunteer to help people less fortunate than you.”

Beginning when he was 9 years old, his mother and grandmother would take Adam and his brother with them—on Christmas, among other days—to volunteer at the Jubilee Soup Kitchen, serving hot meals to homeless Pittsburghers.

Iddriss would go on to amass an impressive record of community service while attending Pitt and, before that, Oakland’s Central Catholic High School. A full listing of those activities literally fills pages of Iddriss’ Truman Scholarship application; some highlights follow:

• He is the president of Pitt’s Golden Key International Honour Society, which, among other initiatives, does service work at Family House, a nonprofit organization that provides low-cost housing and support for critically ill patients. A grant he wrote for the organization recently was approved to coordinate a project with College After School Team (CAST), which sponsors mentoring of students at Peabody High School. In addition, he has helped to establish international service projects with sister chapters in Malaysia and the Virgin Islands. Iddriss plans to spend two months in Tanzania this summer with the Engineering World Health Summer Institute, offered through Duke University;

• Iddriss has been president of Pitt’s Pre-Medical Organization for Minority Students (POMS). Under his leadership, POMS has organized anatomy labs, clinical presentations, service projects, and opportunities for minority students to “shadow” health professionals. Recognizing that certain diseases such as sickle cell anemia disproportionately strike people of color, and that such patients need transfusions that closely match their own blood types, Iddriss organized Pitt’s first minority blood drive; and

• Iddriss is service chair and technology chair of Facilitating Opportunities and Climate for Underrepresented Students (FOCUS), which mentors freshman minority students and coordinates service projects.

Through Pitt’s Investing Now program, Iddriss has mentored high school students interested in math and science. Through Global Links, he has collected and packaged medical supplies for developing nations. He’s been a volunteer tour guide and exhibition presenter at the Carnegie Science Center, and has coordinated activities for children at the Aliquippa Terrace YWCA and the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind.

Iddriss has been volunteering for so long that, even though he’s just 21, he has already begun running into young adults who remember him as their tutor and mentor.

“Recently, I met a student who was enrolled in the [Pitt-hosted] Governor’s School for Health Sciences, and it turned out that I had tutored him in math and science at St. Benedict the Moor elementary school. That was very satisfying to me,” Iddriss says, smiling broadly, “seeing that maybe I had helped to create that spark of interest in medical science.”

Iddriss is grateful to have been on the receiving end of mentoring, too. From his high school days, visiting Pitt through the Boy Scouts of America’s Medical Explorers program, Iddriss fondly remembers Robert H. Connamacher—a.k.a. “Doctor Bob”— a pharmacology professor and outreach coordinator for Pitt’s School of Medicine. Among the dozen or so other Pitt mentors he excitedly rattles off is surgery professor Edward Metz Barksdale.

“Dr. Barksdale let me come into his surgery to shadow him, ask him questions about his techniques, and visit his clinic,” Iddriss says. “Having that kind of interaction with a surgeon who today is where I someday hope to be, career-wise—those are the things that really mean a lot when you’re trying to decide whether to pursue a particular career.”

Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg’s first connection to the Iddriss family was through Adam’s brother, Jamel, who was the doubles partner of Nordenberg’s older son when the two played tennis for Central Catholic. The chancellor met Adam and Carol Iddriss a couple of years later.

“At the picnic following our Freshman Convocation in the year that Jamel came to Pitt [1998], he brought his family over to introduce them to me,” Nordenberg remembers. “In the course of the conversation, Jamel’s mother pointed to Adam, who would only have been about 15 years old, and said, ‘In a few years, you’re going to get him, too.’”

Carol Iddriss’ prediction came true: Jamel graduated from Pitt in 2001 (he’s now a third-year law student at George Mason University), and Adam enrolled at Pitt in fall 2002.

“Adam obviously is one of our truly outstanding and committed students, as is reflected in his selection for the Truman Scholarship,” says Nordenberg, calling Carol “one of the nicest, most helpful people you ever could hope to meet.”

Adam himself hasn’t always described her that way.

“One day when Adam was 7, he and his brother were in the living room studying, and I was cooking dinner,” Carol recalls, smiling mischievously. “One of their friends knocked on the door and asked, ‘Can Adam come out and play?’ I said, ‘No, first he has to eat dinner and do his homework, then he can come out.’”

Adam’s friend persisted, but again Carol explained that it would be hours before Adam could go out and play.

Returning to the kitchen, Carol overheard Adam tell his brother: “Our mom is mean. She makes us stay inside all the time, reading and doing homework.”

“No, I’m not mean,” Carol remembers telling Adam. “But you do have to eat dinner, and you do have to finish your homework.”

“But can’t I go out and play first?” she remembers Adam pleading.

“No.”

Occasionally, Carol still teases Adam about that exchange. “I’ll remind Adam: ‘You said I was so mean, but now you’re the one who always has his nose in a book.’ I mean, when you see Adam, he’s always carrying books or reading books, and some of those volumes are this thick,” Carol says, holding her right thumb and forefinger a good two inches apart. “When he comes home to do his laundry, if the TV is on, he’ll turn it off so he can study.”

“All I can say,” Adam replies, smiling sheepishly, when told what his mother said about him, “is that I have to get my work done. With a full course load and research projects, it’s important for me to stay focused.”

Can’t afford to waste a minute, eh?

“Oh, some minutes, yeah, but…” he allows, with a laugh.

Carol continues: “At New Year’s, Adam and I went to my sister’s for dinner. He ate with us, but as soon as he could he pulled out a book and started reading. My sister went over and tickled him, saying, ‘Come on, Adam, be one of us for a change. Put that book down.’”

And he did—for a few minutes, Carol says. Then he picked it back up.

“He’s just that way,” she shrugs, proudly. “And that’s a good thing.”