Indiana University School of Medicine CTSI Intern: Medical, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists and Clinicians Prepatory Program (MPESC)

The connections I made with my supervisors as an LHSI intern allowed me to continue as an intern with Mrs. Hoffman and Dr. Tucker-Edmonds for two summers. I am also extremely fortunate to receive the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute R25 grant to fund my research and receive support throughout the school year.

Not only am I an intern, but I also feel like an informed student. At MPESC, we attend numerous presentations of IU medical professionals' journeys, learning our resources, MCAT advice, tips on research, and even more. 

Summer 2022 

This summer, I continue to focus on the MAD research study with a more prominent role: recruiting. We struggled with collecting enough participants during my time as an LHSI intern, so Mrs. Hoffman tasked me with finding creative ways to recruit participants. I have never worked in recruitment, so it sounded like an easy task. How hard could it be to find 60 dyads of prospective second-trimester parents and experienced parents of second-trimester loss who also have diverse family dynamics? Apparently very difficult! 

I never thought about how vital recruitment is in research, it truly is the most important stage. Therefore, this summer, I worked as hard as I could to recruit families. As a proud Gen-Z social media user, I made social media my main form of contact. I used numerous approaches. At first, I focused on finding communities of my targeted demographic to post our ads. For example, Facebook was a great application to find groups of parents who experienced periviable delivery. However, after a while, this technique lost its traction once I posted in almost all the huge and active groups. 

Then, I had a new idea. I found posts from parent's personal accounts posting about their experiences in pregnancy and second-trimester loss, so we asked the IRB if it was ethical to directly these clearly eligible parents. This allowed me to personally contact people and ensure their eligibility quicker to schedule the interviews. However, it did take a toll on me. It was difficult to scroll through numerous first-hand stories with images of their micropreemies. I felt strongly emphatic to these families. No parent expects their pregnancy journey to suddenly end in their second-trimester nor to have the strength to cope through it. Therefore, I wanted to possess some strength as well and ensured each parent felt comfortable to be vulnerable with me. 

I organized the methods of contact the team and I took for recruiting families into a huge database via Microsoft Excel. I am so proud of the way the sheet grew over the summer. I included categories such as embedded links to the social media groups, the number of active members, the tone of their responses, and even more. Since the research is still ongoing, I (unfortunately) cannot include the exact sheet in this e-Portfolio. When it is complete, it will be included in the manuscript. However, as part of MPESC, I gave both a PowerPoint presentation and poster presentation over my research. These presentations explain in detail my work this summer and I created digestible graphs instead of the Excel sheet. 

Research Presentation

SUMMER 2023

Of course, I returned to the research team for another summer 😀. In Summer 2023, I learned how unpredictable research can be and how difficult it is to run a research study. Dr. BTE's team collaborated with Indiana University Health (IUHealth; IUH) to create their own Barbershop 2.0 research study. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, disproportionately affects minoritized populations in addition to minoritized populations being less likely to go to their primary care provider for help, if they have one. Therefore, the original barbershop research study aimed to intervene and educate the people who are most likely affected by hypertension in the places where they already are -- in their communities. Researchers recruited barbers to help measure the blood pressure of their patrons as they received their haircuts and could video call with pharmacists to decrease their blood pressure. Since the original barbershop study was so successful, IUH wanted to execute its own version of the barbershop study in Indianapolis, and I was asked to help.

RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS