STUDENT PROTEST LEADS TO ACTIVISM

In March students at North and Central staged a walkout to protest the pending U.S. war on Iraq. Said then-North student Sara Ellena, “Sometimes you have to break a rule or law to prove a point.” Their walk mirrored an anti-war rally at the Federal Plaza in Chicago and elsewhere throughout the U.S. In all, about 150 North students joined the protest. Dhruv Boddupalli, a senior at Naperville North who was helping Ellena organize the event, told the Naperville Sun that he thought this was a good way to bring awareness to the subject and to show that students care about global issues. “My hope is for people who’ve never been to a rally to learn of other social causes,” said Boddupalli in the Sun. The group also asked Howard Zinn to speak at North, which he did, and organized a food drive and a student/teacher debate on the war.

Nearly 20 years later, Boddupalli recalled that time was the beginning of his interest in social change. “What I realized is that even though we weren’t successful in that instance, we can mobilize and come together and address larger issues.” He and his fellow Naperville North protesters were suspended from school for a day for their activities and his parents learned of his indiscretion when a broadcast reporter called his home. “They were proud of me but at the same time it was like ‘What the heck were you doing?’” he recounted.

He went on to MIT, graduating in chemical-biological engineering, earned a medical degree from Stanford Medical School and completed a residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, part of the Harvard University teaching hospitals. His interests then turned to technology, where he founded and worked at multiple startups. He was an early employee of Zipline, a U.S. startup building drone logistics. Boddupalli helped the company grow in Sub-Saharan Africa where Zipline delivered blood products, medicines, and health supplies to facilities within minutes in a 50-mile radius. Zipline has since expanded to seven more countries, including the U.S., Japan and Ukraine. After practicing medicine in San Francisco, he returned to Naperville with his wife and two children. He practices internal medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center and works at a health care startup.