Medical Students Gain Research Experience
Allison Heinly (M’11) has always wanted to be a physician. And she has long known that she wants to work with children. So when the School of Medicine announced that all medical students would be required to do a stint of research, either laboratory or clinical, at some point during their four-year training, Heinly quickly scoured a list of volunteer faculty mentors, seeking a match in pediatrics.
She found the name of Kenneth Tercyak, PhD, and contacted him right away. Tercyak, an associate professor in the Department of Oncology’s Division of Health Outcomes and Health Behaviors and Department of Pediatrics, agreed to work with Heinly on a project that sought to improve the health of youngsters who had been treated for cancer.
Heinly was delighted with the opportunity. “Pediatric cancer survivors often have longstanding health issues related to their primary disease, and the late effects of chemotherapy and radiation they received during treatment for cancer,” she says. “The object was to help these young survivors adapt to life after cancer and to understand how proper diet, physical activity, and other health-promoting actions can protect them against future disease. It’s a challenging but rewarding area of work.”
But there was also a challenge for Heinly: Learn the material and work hard enough so that she could submit the results of the research to a scientific conference. Heinly, a first year medical student, wasn’t sure how to begin. And she had never participated as part of a clinical research team before, but was going to learn.
Introducing Heinly and others like her to research is just the point of the new medical school requirement, which was put in place in 2007, says Stephen Ray Mitchell, MD, dean of medical education at the School of Medicine.
“We believe that the critical skills of investigative thinking provide a basis for better medical practice, better assessment of evidence for that practice which will change rapidly for this generation of physicians and a better foundation for the new biology of medicine,” he says. “Allison is a great example of the impact this requirement has already begun to have on our exceptional students like Allison.”
The new requirement, known as the Independent Study Project, “allows GU medical students to pursue a topic of interest, whether it be in the lab or the clinic and perform independent research under a mentor,” says Joseph Timpone Jr., MD, an associate professor of medicine and Director of the Independent Study Projects. “As there has been an increased focus on understanding the aspects of translational research, this is a valuable experience for medical students beginning their careers. By doing an independent study project, students will gain insight into how things move from the lab bench to the patient bedside."
Heinly was just a first year medical student when she contacted Tercyak. She majored in behavioral neuroscience at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania with the goal of attending medical school after graduation. Georgetown was her number one choice, she says, because of its focus on cura personalis – or Jesuit tradition of care of the whole individual – and on service to the community.
She was among the handful of first-year medical students to seek the new research opportunity during the summer before her second year. And she applied for, and received, a stipend to help her fund her independent study in Tercyak’s lab.
Her task was to help analyze data obtained from the SHARE (Survivor Health and Resilience Education) program, a randomized controlled trial devoted to promoting health and well-being among adolescent survivors of childhood cancer, now aged 11-21. Tercyak was the trial’s lead investigator, and received funding from Olympic cyclist Lance Armstrong’s foundation devoted to cancer survivorship in support of the work. Tercyak and his colleagues collected data on cancer treatment and lifestyle and behavioral risk factors (diet, nutrition, and associated health behaviors) and then provided survivors with alternate forms of health education to determine which was superior. To monitor short-term effects of the intervention, the researchers assessed survivors prior to and one- and three-months after treatment was delivered. Heinly’s role was to identify a subset of research questions surrounding pediatric survivors’ nutrition and bone health, and to assist in the preparation and analysis of data that would address those questions.
“I had no research background before this so Tercyak and several members of his lab walked me through what I needed to know, step-by-step, for this project,” Heinly says. “We observed good progress in the survivors. Follow-up bone health knowledge was stronger, and use of calcium supplements doubled along with an increase in milk consumption--all of which are essential to rebuilding healthy bones and preventing bone loss later in life.
“This was a great learning experience,” she says. “It’s important to see how behavioral intervention in young people likely leads to an improved quality of life in these young cancer survivors, possibly preventing the onset and severity of late effects from cancer treatment.
“I learned that advances in health care are made by improving the evidence base of what treatments work best for patients,” Heinly says.
“It takes an exceptionally ambitious medical student to take on a research project before the second year,” Tercyak says. “Working with Allison was a rewarding experience for me - she’s very modest about what she was able to accomplish in a summer’s time. She is going to be a wonderful doctor.”
Heinly’s work was peer reviewed and accepted for presentation at the Eastern Society for Pediatric Research (part of the Pediatric Academic Societies), and she received a travel award to attend the March meeting in Philadelphia. She also presented her results at a regional meeting of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, and is now preparing the findings for publication.
This fall, Heinly enters her third year of medical school, and has not wavered from her pursuit of pediatrics, or from her pursuit of service. This past year she has headed the student pediatric interest group, which hosts holiday activities, coordinates a book drive, and donates proceedings to the pediatric inpatient unit at Georgetown University Hospital. She also volunteers with the Georgetown Medical Student-Patient Partners Program, in which medical students are paired with pediatric patients suffering from chronic illness. The students offer their time and support to the children, helping to ease their time while in the hospital.
Her goal is to work in an underserved area with hospitalized children, perhaps in pediatric oncology – the field that Tercyak works in. “I find working with children extremely rewarding and I’m really looking forward to a career in pediatrics,” she says.
By Renee Twombly, GUMC Communications
