Andrew Peters

About Andrew

(updated 6/2015) Andrew Peters was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota. A lifelong fascination with language, its content, and its structure drove his studies at nearby Carleton College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2013 with a B.A. in linguistics, with distinction for his thesis project on mathematical models for Spanish phonology. He travelled to Kyoto for an all-too-brief trimester studying Japanese linguistics at Doshisha University in 2012. Andrew has a passion not just for linguistics but for language learning, having studied Latin, Spanish, and Japanese. He developed these pursuits alongside a long- held affnity for science and medicine, immersing himself in HIV research for three summers at the Mayo Clinic. The physicians he met and worked with there galvanized his desire for a medical career, and eventually his move to Chicago in fall 2013 to attend Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He is particularly interested in language disorders, as they represent an area where medicine and linguistics critically overlap; in his frst year he pursued that interest as a member of Northwestern’s Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory.
Outside of classes, Andrew has found teaching and tutoring fulflling; he worked as a Writing Center tutor throughout his Carleton career and volunteered at an after-school science program for middle schoolers in Humboldt Park, Chicago. He has always been a musician, playing piano and horn, and performing in orchestras in his hometown and at Carleton. Music – along with reading, writing, the outdoors, and of course time with family and friends – is what keeps him mindful, open, and inspired.
During his Luce year, Andrew has returned to Japan to participate in research on developmental language disorders with Dr. Yumiko Tanaka-Welty at  Osaka University of Arts . Among other projects, he developed a number of intervention and assessment materials and is currently using them at an Osaka elementary school with language-impaired children, one of whom is the subject of a case study by Andrew and two colleagues in progress. Especially since he views clinical work as the main purpose and focus of his medical career, it has been an extraordinary opportunity that the Luce year entailed not just research behind the scenes but direct work with a clinical population, from a perspective that an American medical student wouldn’t usually see. The next adventure will be to integrate the lessons learned into the next three years of medical education back in Chicago.