¡Hola y bienvenidos! I graduated from Wellesley College in 2010 with a major in Neuroscience and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. I chose Wellesley because I knew I would be able to continue expanding my research experience at Wellesley by really getting to know my professors in a nurturing environment. Wellesley did indeed meet my expectations. Immediately upon arriving at Wellesley College as a first year student, I expressed my passion in research to Professor Tetel, who gladly accepted me to join his research team.

After joining the Tetel lab, I worked on studying how hormones act in the brain to regulate gene expression and behavior. During the first two years in the lab, I collaborated with Mackensie Yore (’08) to study protein-protein interactions between nuclear steroid receptors (estrogen and progestin receptors) and their coregulators from female rat brain. For my senior thesis project, I developed a pull-down assay using sub-cloned mouse progestin receptor subtypes (A and B) and coactivator proteins from female mouse brain. Using the mouse model, we aimed to find identify the key molecules involved in ovarian hormone-receptor mediated gene expression in brain.

My research at Wellesley was funded through an Endocrine Society Research Fellowship, which also provided funding for me to present my research at the 2008 Endocrine Society Conference in San Francisco. I also collaborated with Mackensie Yore (’08) on our previous project, which we presented at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in 2007.

Wellesley’s interdisciplinary approach allowed me to connect my major, Neuroscience and my minor, Women’s and Gender Studies, to merge my passion in clinical and social medicine, specifically looking at how social factors construct out health. In summer 2009, I received a travel grant from Wellesley, which allowed me to work in Guatemala to evaluate how congenital defects are detected, diagnosed, and treated at a government health clinic that oversees 180 rural villages. By immersing myself in these impoverished communities and interviewing the local women and their healthcare providers, I have gained a broad perspective of maternal-fetal health—often times inevitably shaped by the social and economic structures of our society.

My field research, which was originally designed to observe the status of maternal-fetal health in a rural community, evolved into a community health program in El Triunfo, Guatemala. I continued shaping the project with the villagers when I revisited El Triunfo in November 2009 with another travel grant from Wellesley. In summer 2010, I returned to El Triunfo for the third time, but this time with seven Wellesley students. We successfully launched Proyecto Doctoritas, a community health program that: (1) provides ten teenage girls with full three-year scholarships to attend middle school and (2) trains these girls as community health workers (hence the name "doctoritas"). We thank the local leaders and health professionals, the villagers, and our generous donors for helping us maintain and sustain the program through its pilot stage. I returned to El Triunfo many times after graduating from Wellesley to run a medial brigade in collaboration with Partners in Health and to teach Harvard University students about community engagement and project sustainability.

After graduating from Wellesley, I received a Master of Philosophy degree (M.Phil) in Public Health at the University of Cambridge in England. This one-year program was fully funded by the Wellesley College Susan Rappaport Knafel ’52 Scholarship for Foreign Study and the University of Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholarship for Graduate Studies. At Cambridge, I focused my training in public health on how academic and clinical research in genetics can be incorporated into improving the health of all members of our community—locally, nationally, and globally. For my dissertation, I worked with the Public Health Genetics Foundation (PHG), an international non-profit research organization based in Cambridge, to develop a universal blueprint for designing, establishing, and maintaining a comprehensive surveillance system for congenital disorders.

I received medical degree (M.D.) at Harvard Medical School in 2016. I also received a joint master’s degree in public policy (M.P.P) at Harvard Kennedy School of Government as a Gleitsman Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. My focus was on understanding how to best address problems of health and social inequalities. While at Harvard, I worked domestically and abroad. With Partners in Health (PIH), I implemented and evaluated a cervical cancer prevention and treatment program in rural Guatemala. As an Albert Schweitzer Fellow (2014-15), I conduct a project serving the needs of children facing barriers to obtaining mental health services at Boston Children’s Hospital. The majority of my education was supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which awards up to $90,000 over two academic years to support the graduate educations of 30 New Americans each year. This is a short article on the fellowship published on the Wellesley website.

My interest in social medicine and advocacy led me to my current medical residency training in emergency medicine at Harvard. I see my work in the emergency department (ED) as the crucial first step in addressing the needs of our patients in their most vulnerable moments. Emergency physicians are also uniquely positioned to advocate for patients who would otherwise receive no care at all. My current interest is in understanding how to best provide care to patients presenting with substance use disorder and psychiatric needs. I am leading a group of residents to conduct a research study, aimed at understanding how ED providers view buprenorphine and naloxone (Suboxone) as a treatment option for patients presenting to the ED with opioid use disorder. This study is supported by the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) Community Action and Care for the Medically Uninsured and Underinsured Program. I hope this work will contribute to improving quality of care and patient safety for the marginalized subsets of patients we care for in the ED. After residency, I plan on pursuing a fellowship in either health policy research or quality improvement and patient safety / ED administration.  

When not working in the ED, I enjoy exploring different parts of New England with my husband and our cavapoo. I also love working on interior decoration and home improvement projects for our home in Newton, MA (only 10 minutes away from Wellesley College!).

PUBLICATIONS

Paper:

Im DD, Palazuelos L, Xu L, Molina RL, Palazuelos D, Sullivan M. A Community-Based Approach to Cervical Cancer Prevention: Lessons Learned in Rural Guatemala. Program in Community Health Partnerships, publication scheduled Spring 2018.

Acharya KD, Nettles SA, Sellers KJ, Im DD, Harling M, Pattanayak C, Vardar-Ulu D, Lichti CF, Huang S, Edwards DP, Srivastava DP, Denner L, Tetel MJ. The Progestin Receptor Interactome in the Female Mouse Hypothalamus: Interactions with Synaptic Proteins Are Isoform Specific and Ligand Dependent. eNeuro 2017 Sep 20;4(5).

Im D, Essien U, DePasse JW, Chiappa V. Acute on chronic liver failure (ACLF) in a patient with sickle cell anemia (HbSS). BMJ Case Reports. 2015 Jul 1; 2015.

Shannon G.D., Im, D., Katzelnick, L., Franco, O.H. Gender equity and health: Evaluating the impact of Millennium Development Goal Three on women’s health in South Asia. Women & Health 2013, 53(3):217-43.

Palazuelos, D., Ellis, K., Im, D, Pckarsky, M., Schwarz, D., Farmer, D., Dhillon, R., Johnson, A., Orihuela, C., Hackett, J., Bazile, J., Berman, L., Ballard, M., Panjabi, R., Slavin, S., Lee, S., and Selinsky, S. 5-SPICE: An Original Framework for Community Health Worker Program Design, Quality Improvement and Research Agenda Setting. Global Health Action 2013, 6: 19658.

Yore, M.A., Im, D., Webb, L.K., Zhao, Y., Chadwick, J.G.Jr., Molenda-Figueira, H.A., Haidacher, S.J., Denner, L.A. and Tetel, M.J. Steroid receptor coactivator-2 (SRC-2) expression in brain and physical associations with steroid receptors. Neuroscience, 169: 1017-1028, 2010.