Dr. Roger Seheult, an associate clinical professor of internal medicine in the UCR School of Medicine and a UCR alumnus, has been awarded the Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa Medical Merit Medal for helping put together a COVID-19 policy, including testing and early treatment, for the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Seheult is the cofounder of MedCram, an online medical educational company. Early in the pandemic, the company used videos to educate many people worldwide, including Bahrainis, about the scientific aspects of SARS-CoV2, the virus that spreads COVID-19. 

Seheult and a colleague at MedCram are the first non-Bahrainis to be recognized with the medals, which they received on March 3, 2022, from His Excellency Shaikh Abdulla bin Rashid bin Abdulla Al-Khalifa, Bahrain’s ambassador to the United States and Canada.

“Even non-medical people could understand the MedCram YouTube lecture series on COVID-19 we put together,” Seheult said. “We had a number of guests in our videos who talked about testing and discussed many aspects of treatment. Unbeknownst to us, these videos also educated the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who had put together a task force to deal with the crisis.”  

According to Seheult, the MedCram videos provide unbiased and nonpolitical information that early on guided and helped the task force prepare Bahrain for the COVID-19 crisis.

“I enjoy teaching complicated topics in a simple way,” Seheult said.  “My time teaching at the tutoring center when I was an undergraduate at UCR certainly helped me develop this skill.”