Education
Zack Timmons integrated business and medicine to take on a social problem facing his community. [Show summary] Zack Timmons, a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at UT Austin, combined his passion for medicine with his background in business to create Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Listen to the conversation >> A med student and social entrepreneur on a mission to alleviate food insecurity in his area [Show notes] Zack Timmons is a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder and CEO at Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Since launching Good Apple in November 2019 as a third-year medical student, Zack and his team have delivered over 540,000 pounds of healthy food directly to the doors of over 17,000 people facing food insecurity. Prior to medical school, Zack attended Rice University where he studied the cognitive sciences and was premed. He later worked for two years as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting. He plans to pursue an emergency medicine residency, where he hopes to leverage his patient stories in the emergency room to continue building programs and organizations to meet the health needs of our community's most vulnerable residents. Can you tell us a bit about your background outside of medicine? [2:14] I grew up near Waco, Texas in a small town just outside of Waco called Robinson, Texas, and lived there with my younger sister and my two parents who are a huge influence on my life. My dad is a commercial tire salesman and my mom's a social worker. I think they've really instilled the importance of getting to know people and service in the community. They're a huge influence on me. I always really enjoyed the outdoors. I think that's something I still enjoy today, from downhill skiing to long-distance backpacking. Most recently, my partner and I completed about 300 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail in California. Cooking is also a huge hobby. I spent a little bit of time in the Northeast prior to medical school and got to know Marc Vetri, who is an incredible pasta chef in Philadelphia. So have recently been making a lot of homemade pasta, which is great. When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:38] Probably when I was a senior in high school, I made the decision that I was at least interested in medicine. I will say one thing is that my passions for medicine have definitely changed and matured the more I get into the field. I think there are so many reasons to be excited about healthcare today. But I think initially, the way I started off was maybe a pretty simple story. I was really interested in the sciences and loved the application in helping people. That was kind of the initial impetus to my path. When I got to Rice University where I went to undergrad, as you mentioned, I had this incredible opportunity to work as an emergency medicine technician, and I actually gained my advanced certification through a course at Rice, which is really cool. So I did that for three years during undergrad. I really always had a passion for emergency medicine. Initially, it was a lot around loving the pace of the field. I loved the opportunity to make an immediate impact on patients’ lives. But I think more recently, I've really appreciated newer things about emergency medicine: the opportunities to solve some really complex clinical challenges. In emergency medicine, we see a lot of undifferentiated patients, which is such an exciting thing to take care of, and then more systems-based. I think we see a lot of the problems in the healthcare system, both medical and social problems, things like housing and education that really impact people's health. That's my new passion in medicine: How do we create these health centers that also provide medical care? Medicine is such a vast field.