BANGOR, Maine — A Hampden resident and graduate of John Bapst Memorial High School has won a J. William Fulbright grant to conduct a public health study in China.
Andrew Babbitt, 22, graduated this month with a degree in mathematics from Boston College. He learned in April that he was a recipient of the prestigious grant program for international educational exchange established by Sen. J. William Fulbright in 1946.
Babbitt who studied Mandarin in high school and spent time in Beijing during his junior year of college will travel to Guangzhou, China, in August to study how homosexual men utilize HIV/AIDS services.
Babbitt said in an interview Friday there have been a number of initiatives in China to expand testing and treatment services and make them available to the population free of charge, but little is known about how well the services are used.
By studying how homosexual men utilize testing and treatment, he hopes to determine whether any delivery models result in higher usage rates and work to expand those models.
“One of the issues just globally is that gay men are 80 percent more likely than the general population to be affected by HIV/AIDS,” he said. “It’s just a very important population to learn about, and in China right now that research hasn’t been done as in depth as it has in other places.”
Babbitt’s work will keep him in Guangzhou, China’s third largest city, through mid-July 2016. He already has signed on to work in the Boston office of London-based L.E.K. Consulting, a global management consulting firm.
L.E.K. is a generalist firm with expertise in defense, aviation, life science, health care, energy, transportation, consumer products and financial services.
Babbitt anticipates working on a broad variety of projects at L.E.K. As for his future education, Babbitt said he has not decided what he’ll do next, but he is considering medical school and public health studies.
As for his mathematics major at Boston College, where he attended on a full academic scholarship, Babbitt said he never intended to go into math academia or math research.
“It was just something I enjoyed and sort of thought would make me a better thinker,” he said.
“I try to tailor the sort of thought that goes into math and bring that into my other interest,” he said.
Follow Evan Belanger on Twitter at @evanbelanger.