5/28/2025
For Dr. Kaden Rawson, the story of medical school is told in countless images: the tanned face of a rural Illinois farmer, a surgeon exhausted from an hours-long surgery, a student examining a patient for the first time. These are the worth-a-thousand-words stories of modern medical practice, innovation, and training that Rawson has spent the last three years telling, from an insider’s lens.
“It [photography] has changed my perspective on medicine. ”
Dr. Kaden Rawson CI MED Class of 2025
As a medical student and photographer for Carle Illinois College of Medicine’s Office of Marketing and Communications, Rawson and his camera captured images and moments that poignantly reveal the people and daily experiences at the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine.
“Each photo tells a different story,” Rawson said. “In surgery, I try to highlight the intensity of the emotion with high contrast and dark shadows. In an outpatient or community setting, I use soft lines and brighter lights to instill a sense of joy and well-being. But my pictures can only do so much to add to a story; it’s up to the viewer to engage with the image to find the story within.”
Capturing the moment
Rawson’s camera has traveled with him into the classroom, student-run clinics, research labs, and even into the surgical suite where he has recorded rare behind-the-scenes glimpses into the experiences that shape the next generation of physician-innovators.
“I see medicine as an art and a science, where every detail, and every moment matters. Photography has taught me to be mindful and about the importance of being present,” he said. “It’s really solidified to me that there are humans, there are people that feel, think, act, and do at the very center of this entire world of health care. Being able to photograph them has hammered into me that that’s what it’s all about.”
Picture it
The physician-photography connection wasn’t part of Rawson’s plan.
At about the same time CI MED was being formed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Rawson was half a world away in Russia teaching English. “It was near impossible to describe my day-to-day life to friends and family back home with a simple text or email. iPhone photos didn’t work very well, either. Something was missing. Fortunately, a friend offered to teach me about photography as a means of visual storytelling,” Rawson said.
He bought a camera, some gear, and a book on photography. “It didn’t take long before I felt like my camera became a natural extension of my eyes and memory,” he said. Soon, he was supplementing his dispatches back to Utah with images of his daily life in Western Siberia.
Fast-forward to 2021: Rawson has completed his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Utah and is focused on his first year in medical school at CI MED. Once again, photography became a way to connect.
“Within a matter of months at Carle Illinois, I realized that my colleagues were struggling with the same difficulty I faced in Russia—they were living a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but struggled to effectively communicate their lived experiences to friends and family back home. So, I decided to expand my photographic endeavors to encompass not only my life and education in Urbana but the entire Class of 2025.”
Kaden Rawson, MD, CI MED Class of 2025
The class elected Rawson as the CI MED student government marketing chair. Through a partnership with CI MED’s Marketing/Communications team, Rawson earned the trust of students, faculty, and staff in telling CI MED’s unique stories. His photos have been used on media platforms with local, regional, and national reach.
Focus on the Future
After graduating with honors from CI MED in May of 2025, the newly minted Dr. Kaden Rawson intends to bring a photographer’s focus as he immerses himself in internal medicine residency at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“I have come to realize that I am lucky to be here. I consider myself extremely blessed and fortunate to practice medicine with the intent to improve the health and well-being of my fellow man and woman,” Rawson said.
His long-term career goal is to specialize in interventional cardiology. He also hopes to see his work published in National Geographic one day.
Editor's note: The photo gallery below represents some of Dr. Rawson's favorite photos taken during his time as a CI MED student, as well as staff picks from the Marketing/Communications office.