Student Stories: Alex McLeod

Alex McLeod

Class of 2022
Major: Neuroscience and Medicine, Health, and Society

During Alex’s first year at Vanderbilt, he wandered into Vanderbilt’s Innovation Center, the Wondr’y, to learn more about the Virtual Reality lab. Feeling a little homesick, he used the headset to transport himself back home and was immediately in awe of the power of VR. Given his professional areas of interest, he pondered whether there were applications to a medical setting.

Alex and a friend, Shubham Gulati, began to research virtual reality in their spare time. In hopes of administering VR as a form of therapy to patients. The pair began to reach out to medical centers in the area. While the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center offers some stress-relief activities and therapeutic entertainment for patients, the center didn’t offer VR. They became enthusiastic about having the students facilitate VR experiences for their patients.

Now a junior at Vanderbilt, double majoring in Neuroscience and Medicine, Health, and Society with a minor in Business, Alex’s idea has rapidly grown. After connecting with Assistant Professor Ole Molvig, Alex decided to turn his incredible VR work at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center into an Immersion plan. Alex was able to attend a global, remote medical conference on therapeutic VR projects with funding provided through the College of Arts and Science. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Alex had started to collect data on VR’s effect on the stress, anxiety, and pain levels of the cancer patients he worked with. Unique to the research space on VR in the infusion clinic, Alex and Shubham hope to present their findings at a conference after they can finish gathering results.

In addition to contributing to modern research on Virtual Reality in a medical setting, Alex co-founded the organization named oVRcome, which recruits Vanderbilt students to volunteer at the hospital to work and build relationships with patients through VR. The mission of the organization is to “provide outpatient infusion clinic patients with the opportunity to experience virtual reality as a source of entertainment, distraction, and stress relief.” So far, the organization has visited 82 patients!

So, what’s next for Alex? Upon graduation, Alex hopes to attend medical school. He also plans to train younger Vanderbilt students to lead and expand the oVRcome organization. Ultimately, Alex wants to start a Virtual Reality program in his own medical facility!