Instead of spending his last summer as a student in freedom, Steve Humphrey went to work. In the process he learned about himself and may have provided a new clue about how to stop violence among young people.

Humphrey grew up on the north side of Racine, son of two pediatricians at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, graduated from St. Catherine's High School and Notre Dame, and is now a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin. That's where he heard a presentation on the physiology of gunshot wounds and a speaker from Project Ujima, and that intrigued him enough to spend the 12 weeks of his summer school holiday researching youth violence. Next summer he'll start the clinical rotations that train him to be a physician.

Ujima (the third principle of Kwanzaa and taken from a Swahili word meaning working together to make things right) started in 1995 in response to a violent year, said Dr. Marlene Melzer-Lange, professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Humphrey's supervisor. There was a program in place for child abuse but not for youth violence, she said.

The project includes the collaborative efforts of several Wisconsin groups. If a family accepts Project Ujima services, workers will try to get at the roots of violence so there are no subsequent injuries, Melzer-Lange said. Children who may come from Racine, Kenosha or other communities are connected with local services, although she said Ujima is considering whether it should establish a similar agency for Racine and Kenosha.

As an undergraduate, Humphrey had worked as an assistant to a doctor studying a tropical disease. It was passed through sand flies, and Humphrey's job was to keep them happy. For his medical college project, Melzer-Lange suggested that he examine violent injuries over a long time span by using an injury database kept by the college.

One of the surprising results, which also surprised Melzer-Lange, was where injuries occurred. Of the 587 subjects in the study, 149 were at or around school, he said. Another group, but not a statistically significant number, occurred around bus stops or on buses. The school finding suggests that's an important spot for intervention.

"To pull off the anti-bullying," Melzer-Lange said, "you really have to get the entire staff involved, everybody from the principal, to the teachers, to the cafeteria people, to the hall monitors, to the social worker, to even the people that do environmental services, because kids are sneaky. So they may not act up or bully in the presence of their teacher because the teacher knows them, but it's another thing in the lunchroom."

So far Humphrey's research has been summarized only on a poster which he presented at the college. His poster may be chosen for a medical conference, and his work may be accepted for publication in a medical journal. What he learned about himself is what he may wish to do in medicine.

"You know there were some days when I was staring at the computer screen for eight hours just punching things into Excel, where I was like, 'I just want to go home.' But you know, just kind of step aside and step back, and the next day you just come back, and keep doing it. It's one of those things where the more I did, the more excited I was to see what the data was bringing."

The sand fly experience had turned him off to the idea of doing research.

"I have a couple friends that really enjoyed sitting at a bench, both on the computer but doing different genetic - I don't know what they do … the little things like that. To me that wasn't a really big pull in that direction. … But this, the human side, is what really appealed to me."