Josh in Wilderness


My name is Joshua Eastman. I grew up in Huntington, West Virginia. My life is rooted on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and aims to glorify Him and serve others. My mission is to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world through excellent medical practice, the development of free, universal, and dependable healthcare systems, and meaningful, interdisciplinary research.

My passions include:

  • Local community, wherever the Lord leads
  • History, particularly pre-modern
  • Literature
  • Exploration, both urban and wilderness
  • Logic
  • Mathematics
  • Scripture and theology
  • Comparative religion
  • Visual art (appreciating, not creating)
  • Computer science, particularly low-level optimization, geoinformatics, computational modeling, and resource-limited solutions
  • Coffee, particularly french press
  • Endurance running, sometimes

I currently study Medicine at Marshall University Joan C Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, WV, and will pursue a primary care specialty, likely combined Internal Medicine, Pediatrics (Med-Peds) or Family Medicine. I previously studied Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University in New Jersey for undergraduate. My intention is to marry the technical, systems-thinking of environmental engineering with medical and clinical knowledge to address grand challenges in health prevention and infrastructure at population scale. After residency, I intend to practice hospital and outpatient pediatrics and adult primary care in Huntington and in rural, under-resourced areas of WV, and hopefully find opportunities to partner with international health systems for short or long term. I hope to develop interdisciplinary, systems-based research investigating social, economic, infrastructural, political, and environmental drivers of human health, wellbeing, and disease in rural settings, including the development of my own lab in partnership with an academic institution, during my clinical career.

Here’s my CV, if you’re interested in learning more “professional” details.

About this site

The name of this blog comes from the New Testament of the Christian Bible, in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, specifically verse 6:

"But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us."

My blog title “Ceramic Mug” is a play on the verse’s image “jars of clay,” which Paul, the author of this passage, is using to represent the Christian as an empty, earthen vessel that’s filled with the Holy Spirit. I thought “Ceramic Mug” was fitting because of how much I like coffee, while intersecting with the Biblical idea that all I am is a ceramic mug, and that when I’m shattered I can be a testimony to the power of God and resurrection of Jesus.

“ceramic_mug” is also my Xbox-live username.

For books, places, games, music, and ideas that are beloved to me or that I’ve found formative at various stages in my life, please refer to my library.

This blog is built using the open-source static site generator Jekyll. Jekyll is easy to set up and publish through Github Pages as a free blogging platform. This site is built on the default base theme minima with some customization.