Using music and medicine to comfort others
He had a car and a cello. They had little time left and no place to go.
Jerry Zhou ’21 provided a soundtrack for their final days.
“Feeling music is innate to who we are as humans,” said the Trumbull College student leader and cellist from Tennessee, who co-founded Yale Undergraduates at Connecticut Hospice. “And it’s more important than ever for those who are dying to still feel present and to feel human.”
The group’s members attend to patients in Branford, Connecticut — feeding them, washing them, listening. And in Zhou’s case, performing.
He would set up in a common room or the hallway.
“There were always a few who would be rolled out from their room,” he said. “I don’t think it was because my cello playing was so great; I think music is just our most fundamental language.”
Throughout Zhou’s Yale experience, he discovered ways to blend music with an interest in medicine and an instinct to aid, comfort, soothe, pitch in.
“There is a deep humility to him,” said Trumbull College Head Margaret Clark. “He focuses outward on other people and makes everyone feel important and liked.”
A member of Low Strung, a 12-member undergraduate group that Zhou describes as “the world’s largest all-cello rock band,” he initially performed for patients at Yale New Haven Hospital, drawing on a repertoire of Aretha Franklin, Elvis, and Lady Gaga songs. He took requests, too: “‘Let me learn some Bach and I’ll be back in a week.’”
Zhou’s active Yale life also involved serving his peers in Trumbull, touring overseas with Low Strung, and learning Chinese, his parents’ native language. For the first time, he said, he began communicating with them in their language, and wanting to.
The molecular, cellular, and developmental biology major tutored New Haven students in the Pathways to Science program and served as co-president of the Trumbull College Council and head first-year counselor. He graduates with a joint B.S./M.S degree, a job with a Boston life sciences firm, and medical school applications underway.
Zhou worked on gene editing in a Yale immunology lab, but he envisions a career in surgery.
“I’ve always been extremely hands-on,” he said — with a cello bow, tennis racquet (strength: serve; weakness: backhand), gardening spade, LEGOs.
He built his life at Yale around Trumbull, where he arranged dances (pre-pandemic), therapy dog visits, and one-on-one work with Trumbullians in the doldrums. Earlier this year he lined up a food truck from his favorite breakfast sandwich shop, Bridgeport’s Tasty Yolk, for a weekday college visit. When the truck ran out of eggs, Clark said, Zhou quietly dashed out for more.
“Jerry pitches in to get done what needs to get done without any complaining and without seeking any credit,” she said. “…In time, he’ll be a stellar physician, but I am confident he’ll be far more as well. He will be charitable and involved in the world and in all the communities of which he’ll be a part.”
Media Contact
Bess Connolly : elizabeth.connolly@yale.edu,