Connecting through lore
Georgetown and Howard universities partner on medical humanities and health justice
SUMMER 2024
Incubating at the intersection of AI and health
Faculty weigh in on impact, ethics around artificial intelligence in health care.
Bridging
disciplines and distance
Virtual interprofessional program highlights the School of Nursing’s trailblazing role in online learning.
The
power of lore
A new venture between Howard University and Georgetown explores medical humanities and health justice in DC.
From the Archives
Editor’s Letter
Check Up News & Research
Student Point of View
On Campus
Alumni Connections
Arts and Letters
Reflections on Health Kieran Kammerer, M.D. (M’86)
This 1941 photo labeled “supervisors” from the School of Nursing’s Caduceus yearbook features a group of Franciscan sisters and nurses who likely taught nursing students during their diploma education. For years, Bill Cessato (C’98, G’16, ’22), deputy director of Georgetown’s Center for Research & Fellowships, has been documenting the undertold stories of women religious at the university. Go to https://g.town/health-sister-leaders to learn more.
Editor’s Letter
I recently attended a conference with college magazine editors from all across the country. In many of the sessions we discussed the concept of innovation.
All of the attendees were creative people, but we agreed that it is easy to lose sight of creativity when a deadline is looming, or there’s a line at your door. I imagine health professionals feel much the same way.
In his book The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson interviewed people doing highly creative work in many fields and found that innovation is more likely when people of different disciplines, backgrounds, and areas of expertise share their thinking.
That’s exactly what’s happening in the Virtual Interprofessional Education (VIPE) program at the School of Nursing, the subject of one of our features. Students from institutions across the U.S., representing a wide range of disciplines, are given an opportunity to engage in collaborative problem-solving. There’s a “magic in the tiny room,” explains one of the coordinators, who sees “all these students learning from each other and thinking outside the box.”
This rang true for me when I read this piece. When I’m stuck, I always find a brainstorming session with my colleagues in a real or virtual “tiny room” will spark a new idea, approach, or solution.
This issue explores the concept of innovation from different angles. In addition to our VIPE story, you’ll read about a collaboration between Georgetown and Howard universities focused on how medical humanities can improve health outcomes. And another feature shows how faculty members from around Georgetown are coming together to discuss the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in health care.
We are also proud to highlight the work of the HOYA Clinic in more than one short article. A trailblazer in its space, the clinic is continuing to grow and evolve to serve the DC-area community in new ways, from foot care to swim lessons. Don’t miss the Q&A with Dr. Michelle Roett (M’03), the clinic director, who has dedicated her career to advancing health equity.
Scanning the QR code will send you to a brief survey about the magazine. Thank you in advance for your feedback.
On behalf of my innovative colleagues here at Georgetown University, I want to thank you for reading our publication. Our mission is to produce a twice-annual magazine that highlights the best of Georgetown and our alumni, but we can’t do it alone. Please share your thoughts and suggestions. What kinds of stories do you most enjoy? Do the pictures and online videos help you feel connected to your alma mater? Let us know by responding to this brief survey. Your idea may just be the creative spark we are seeking.
—Camille Scarborough, Editorial Team Lead
Office of Advancement
R. Bartley Moore (SFS’87) Vice President for Advancement
Amy Levin
Associate Vice President for Communications
Erin Greene
Assistant Vice President of Creative
Georgetown Magazine Staff
Camille Scarborough, Editorial Team Lead
Jane Varner Malhotra (G’21), Features Editor Elisa Morsch (G’20), Creative Director
Editorial Team
Gabrielle Barone, Karen Doss Bowman, Leslye Colvin, Nowshin Chowdhury, Shi En Kim, Ilima Loomis, Michael Miller, Racquel Nassor (G’23), Patti North, Lauren M. Poteat, Sara Piccini, Karen Teber, Heather Wilpone-Welborn, Kat Zambon
Design Team
Ethan Jeon, Shikha Savdas, Sofia Velasquez
Project Managers
Hilary Koss, Francesca Falasca
University Photographer Phil Humnicky
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Summer 2024 | Georgetown Health Magazine
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On the cover (left to right): Howard’s Dana Williams, Ph.D., and Georgetown’s Lakshmi Krishnan, M.D., Ph.D., at the Capitol Campus
Innovations in pancreatic cancer research
n n In the past decade, immunotherapy has offered breakthrough therapies for many cancers that had previously been considered difficult—or even impossible—to treat. One cancer that has eluded the promise of immunotherapy so far, however, has been pancreatic cancer.
This highly aggressive cancer has few treatment options; in most cases, it’s caught too late for surgery, and neither immunotherapy nor radiation are effective, leaving only two toxic chemotherapy cocktails in oncologists’ arsenals. As a result, it’s among the deadliest of cancers, ranking as the third leading cause of cancer deaths, even though it’s relatively rare.
One reason immunotherapy isn’t effective is because pancreatic cancer features so-called “cold” tumors that are not detectable by the immune system.
Now, for the first time, new research by Georgetown scientists shows potential to make immunotherapy effective in
pancreatic cancer. The research team, led by Louis Weiner, is using an agent called BXCL701 to “heat up” cold tumors by altering the tumor microenvironment, making it more receptive to immune cells.
The research is now in a phase 2 clinical trial being tested in people.
“In addition to activating the immune system, this drug has the ability to make it easier for immune cells to maneuver around the tumor, because there isn’t as much collagen blocking their way,” says Weiner.
Weiner’s research is supported in part by BioXcel Therapeutics, Inc., the company developing BXCL701. Support for his work is also provided by the Edwin and Linda Siegel Family Foundation. The clinical trial is supported by BioXcel Therapeutics, Inc. and Merck. n
Georgetown Lombardi has once again earned the coveted distinction of “comprehensive cancer center” by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI first awarded this designation to Georgetown Lombardi in 1974.
Louis Weiner, M.D., talks with Alex Lekan (C’20), an M.D./Ph.D. student in his lab who is contributing to the research into combining BXCL701 with immunotherapy to fight pancreatic cancer.
Professor wins award for nursing textbook
n n The American Journal of Nursing (AJN) selected Fundamentals of Nursing: The Art and Science of Person-Centered Care by Carol Taylor (G’97) and colleagues as a winner of a 2023 Book of the Year Award, garnering third place in the medical/surgical division. The AJN describes the winning books as “the most valuable texts of 2023.”
“This book excels in its commitment to person-centered care, emphasizing the holistic approach that is fundamental to nursing practice,” wrote reviewers.
“What a legacy,” said School of Nursing Dean Roberta Waite of the book, now in its 10th edition. Taylor, the primary author on all editions, commented that she wrote the first half of the first edition about 40 years ago with a pencil on a yellow legal notepad.
In addition to her work as a professor at the School of Medicine and School of Nursing, Taylor is a senior clinical scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She directs an innovative ethics curriculum grounded in a rich notion of moral agency for advanced practice student nurses and Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students. n
Anonymous gift supports Health Justice Alliance
n n An anonymous family foundation recently made a $1.5 million gift to sustain the efforts of the Health Justice Alliance (HJA), Georgetown’s medical-legal partnership that is training future lawyers, physicians, and nurses to collaboratively use the law as a tool to improve health and wellbeing at the patient, systems, and population levels.
The HJA is a collaboration between Georgetown University Medical Center and Georgetown Law, in partnership with Georgetown’s academic health system partner, MedStar Health. As students work with law and medical faculty, providers, and staff to assist patients who struggle with unmet legal needs related to housing, food, insurance, employment, education, and other issues that negatively impact their health and wellbeing, they learn how more holistic patient care can advance health justice and racial equity in the District and beyond.
HJA’s activities focus on three core areas: service to the community, interdisciplinary collaboration and education, and policy-informing research and dissemination of best practices.
The foundation gift will endow an HJA fund to be a sustainable source of unrestricted support over the next 10 years to address needs as they arise. n
The alliance’s work reflects Georgetown’s commitment to human dignity, education, and justice.
A textbook by Georgetown professor Carol Taylor, Ph.D., R.N., and colleagues is gaining special recognition.
Photo: Phil Humnicky
Reducing dementia agitation with THC/CBD combination
n n In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, the Georgetown University Medical Center Memory Disorders Program is studying the effects of an oral drug called T2:C100, which comprises two components found in marijuana— THC and CBD. The goal of the study is to investigate its potential to decrease agitation experienced by those with dementia at the end of life.
Commonly used medications for this agitation—morphine, valium, and haldol—have limited effectiveness. Recognizing the urgent need for better treatment options, the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium
(ACTC) Life’s End Benefits of Cannabidiol and Tetrahydrocannabinol (LiBBY) trial aims to improve the quality of life and death for participants by exploring the potential of T2:C100.
“More than 50 percent of people with dementia will receive hospice care at the end of life; 70 percent of them will receive psychotropic medications to manage agitation. However, these medications often cause unwanted side effects,” explains Melanie Chadwick, the principal research investigator for Georgetown’s Memory Disorders Program. “This study is important because there are no FDA-approved medications to manage agitation at the end of life in dementia.”
Georgetown is recruiting local people near the end of life to participate in this 12-week, phase 2 trial. It is one of approximately 15 sites nationwide participating in the National Institutes of Health-sponsored ACTC LiBBY trial. n
New lung cancer prevention strategies
n n As a behavioral scientist studying cancer, Kathryn Taylor, professor of oncology, chose to hone in on evidence-based strategies to help reduce cancer-related mortality due to tobacco use. The work she co-leads with Randi Williams, assistant professor of oncology, as part of the Lung Screening, Tobacco, and Health (LSTH) research lab at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center is especially relevant to underserved communities, who are often the target of tobacco product marketing.
At the heart of Taylor and Williams’ work is advancing promising early detection strategies and promoting proven smoking cessation efforts. Williams brings her background in public health and a lens of health equity to the LSTH lab, which is part of the Cancer Prevention & Control Program at Georgetown Lombardi.
Their multipronged approach examines barriers of care that underserved populations face involving lung cancer screening referrals, smoking cessation referrals, and treatment. Examples of different prongs include leveraging electronic health records to encourage more equitable promotion of lung cancer screenings and evaluating the effectiveness of using such screenings.
“We became interested in studying teachable moments associated with lung cancer screening among patients who smoked about 10 years ago,” said Taylor. “We see all of these areas fitting together: tobacco use assessment, tobacco treatment, and lung cancer screenings.” n
Kathryn Taylor, Ph.D., and Randi Williams, Ph.D., attended a June 2023 White House Cancer Moonshot Forum on smoking cessation.
Georgetown faculty weigh in on ethics, patient care, and research
BY SHI EN KIM | DESIGN BY ETHAN JEON
mid the growing hype around the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) comes a healthy dose of wariness about the potential for AI to create distrust, exploit humans’ hard work and creativity, and disrupt the labor market.
In health care, experts are grappling with the technical and ethical scope of AI use.
“It’s still so new that people can get over-excited by the possibility of the technology without learning what the conditions of responsibility are,” says Maggie Little, professor of philosophy, senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and founding director of the Ethics Lab.
Many Georgetown researchers are working at this frontier, considering how best to harness AI while also exploring its ethical questions. Georgetown is well positioned for this work, given the strength of interdisciplinary collaboration across the sciences and humanities, along with the academic health system partnership with MedStar Health.
“Georgetown has world-leading experts in bioethics, clinical ethics, and ethics of AI. And we’ve got faculty who care about these issues across the university—in the School of Medicine, the biology department, the computer science department,” says Joel de Lara, teaching professor in philosophy at the Ethics Lab, and coordinator of the Lab’s new initiative in AI, Health, and Ethics. His verdict: “There’s a lot of potential for Georgetown to be a leader at the intersection of AI and health.”
The power of AI
Artificial intelligence refers to the ability of computers to solve complex tasks generally assumed to require human intelligence. Creators train AI models on large amounts of data, during which the algorithms tease out important variables in accordance with set objectives, a skill called machine learning.
In the last decade, the application of AI has exploded across fields and penetrated everyday life. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E have entered the common lexicon. AI is used to sift through data archives, in facial recognition, and for data analytics in research settings. It has had a digital hand in search engines and personalized recommendation systems for media and online shopping platforms.
Many experts think health care is particularly well-suited for AI-driven transformation. Years of medical records, in some cases at the population level, provide good training data for an AI model. Because health care decisions are multivariable and can be life-or-death, a computer can help distinguish real signals from noise to support positive health outcomes.
“Health care is complicated; people are complicated,” says Peter McGarvey, professor in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology. “You read stories about doctors having spent decades of their life figuring out little bits of data and how to put them together. Computers do this faster.”
One area where AI is flourishing is radiology. AI can take stock of seemingly random information and draw correlations that a human might overlook, while offering increased speed and accuracy. One AI-based detection software recorded 70% fewer false-positive errors compared with traditional programs for discerning breast cancer from mammography images, for example. In another study, an AI algorithm offered 19% more accuracy than two radiologists at diagnosing hip fractures. In 2022, 75% of all FDA-approved AI devices were used for radiology.
Beyond cutting-edge research, AI can help with routine administrative tasks, such as summarizing doctor-patient conversations, updating electronic health records, and sending prescriptions to pharmacies. Several hospitals across the U.S. are already putting AI scribes and chatbots to work.
Using AI in these ways could potentially alleviate health care worker burnout, a widespread challenge in the industry. For every hour of patient visits, clinicians need two hours for paperwork, which they often use personal time to finish. Automating clerical tasks clears headspace for workers to be more engaged with patients. By reducing workload, AI may indirectly improve the quality of patient care a health professional can deliver, according to Nawar Shara, chief of research data science, founding codirector of the AI CoLab, co-director of MHRI Center for Biostatistics, Informatics, and Data Science (CBIDS), and associate professor of medicine at Georgetown.
“Machines don’t get tired like humans do,” she says.
Shara has witnessed first-hand the benefits of AI in health care from her own research. In 2018–19, her team ran a pilot project to use AI-driven voice assistant technology to monitor patients with chronic heart failure, a condition that afflicts 6.2 million people in the U.S. Patients are mostly left to manage on their own; the current standard of care is for patients to dial 911 in the event of an emergency, which oftentimes is too late for doctors to make meaningful differences in health outcomes.
“When you have this kind of disease and you don’t manage it well, you’re probably in the ER every other week,” Shara says.
In her own research, Shara and her team supplied 30 MedStar Health patients with voice-assistant devices equipped with natural language processing. Every day, a preprogrammed smart speaker would ask participants about their symptoms and remind them to follow their health regimens. Then the virtual chatbot would analyze patients’ responses and steer the conversation based on the reported symptoms. Should the patient reveal certain predetermined severe symptoms, the AI tool would alert the patient’s health team for intervention.
The team’s clinical trial demonstrated how AI could be deployed for daily patient monitoring from the comfort of the patient’s home. The device doesn’t eliminate the need for human physicians, but it shows how human resources and virtual technology can synergize to deliver personalized regular care. Shara has seen positive patient adoption as well. When the 90-day feasibility study was over,
“a few patients asked to keep the device going,” Shara says. Some patients said that it was one of the few ways they could remember to take their daily medication.
Shara’s team is now exploring AI’s ability to predict the financial burden of complex chronic disease conditions and to monitor gastrointestinal cancer surgery patients.
“AI will absolutely change health care,” Shara says. “In 10 years, health care will take a completely different shape.”
Ethical perils
For all of AI’s promise in health care, experts also see potential peril. AI’s errors can exacerbate inequities in health, harm patient trust in their providers, and make errors that reduce care quality and patient well-being.
One concern is the transfer of human bias over into AI models. In 2019, a landmark study in the journal Science showed that a commercial algorithm for predicting health risk had racially biased outcomes—the software mistook the
disproportionately low health care spending among Black patients, an indicator of health care access, to mean that they were more robust than white patients. So the AI program ruled out a disproportionate number of Black patients from receiving the help that they needed.
Racial inequities appeared in another AI algorithm for predicting when children develop sepsis.
The developers at Duke University Hospital found that doctors using the program took longer to order critical blood tests for Hispanic children than for white children. In examining the discrepancy, the program’s developers suspected that the algorithm may have observed Hispanic children taking longer on average to receive a diagnosis—perhaps their families couldn’t speak English and needed more time to communicate with the doctor—and concluded that this group was fortified against sepsis.
Problems often emerge after products have been released at scale, indicating the need for more due diligence during the testing phase. This due diligence starts with avoiding the trap of over-deference
to AI, pausing to question a computer-rendered decision, Little says. It requires gathering a training dataset that is large enough to accurately represent the general population, so that the AI model can work out genuine correlations.
Due diligence can also involve brainstorming ways the training data set might be inherently biased. Technical tests for the prototype need to be comprehensive to cover diverse scenarios that the AI might encounter in the real world. De Lara recommends bringing in broad expertise and lived experiences during the design process, potentially through the inclusion of diverse advisory groups comprising people who can provide insight into potential areas of bias.
It’s not acceptable to leave society at the mercy of product developers to do their own checks, Little says. She wants to see regulations requiring AI products to undergo standardized auditing requirements or follow safety checklists. Industry-wide regulatory structures raise collective ethical standards while leveling the playing field for those who voluntarily audit their programs in the first place.
The law is trailing the pace of the AI boom, but several state and national efforts are underway to reduce the gap. In 2023, the Biden Administration signed an executive order to set up several guiding principles for the safe and equitable development of AI. In response, 28 providers and payers pledged to responsible use of AI in health care, committing to follow certain transparency practices, such as informing users where AI is involved and tracking AI’s outcomes after product release.
Industry and experts are also coming together to set best-practice standards. The Coalition for Health AI, a consortium of academic and corporate experts in health and data science, released a 24-page blueprint on the trustworthy use of AI in health care. The consortium counts among its founders the FDA and tech giants Google and Microsoft.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to the ethics of AI, de Lara says. Additionally, ethical analyses need to be woven into every stage of product development, not just in the final step.
“If you don’t have regulations, then you lose market share when you’re the good guy,” Little says.
“We need to get away from thinking of ethics as something additive,” he says.
Cultivating an AI-informed society
While experts don’t expect AI to replace many humans in health care jobs in the near term—physicians are at most signing off on AI’s conclusions rather than handing over the reins—AI is changing the workforce by creating a need for doctors who are AI savvy.
“I think a doctor with AI experience will be more relevant in the future of health care than a doctor with no AI experience,” Shara says.
Researchers at Georgetown are implementing various educational programs to cultivate AI awareness in the health care sector.
Shara and McGarvey are part of AIM-AHEAD, the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity. The multi-million-dollar program’s goal is to diversify representation at the nexus of AI and health care through education and community building.
Shara and McGarvey are part of the Data Science Training Core and the Data and Research Core leadership, which involves working with students and faculty from historically Black colleges and universities on AI’s benefits and ethical quandaries. Part of the curriculum includes learning to wield AI for addressing disparities in health, empowering leaders to tackle issues their communities face.
An AI-trained health care workforce means these professionals will have the technical background to develop AI tools that potentially do less harm, as well as the skills to critically evaluate them. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, then you don’t know what probing questions to ask,” Little says.
Little’s work includes providing guidance on the ethics of harnessing big data, including data from social media activity or cellphone location data, to predict HIV risk in sub-Saharan Africa. Determining an individual’s HIV risk is complex, involving various health, familial, and community-level factors that AI has the potential to help untangle. However, researchers also warn of ethical pitfalls, especially if data collection practices start to look like mass surveillance.
Little was part of an 18-member working group, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that drafted guidelines on privacy protection that won’t compromise the space for meaningful innovation. Their core principle: “Do not collect if you cannot protect.” Her team advocated for an independent review board to evaluate data collection protocols, public disclosure of any programs in the name of transparency, and community voice and involvement in decisions around the design and potential deployment of such programs.
The last guideline is the most challenging of all to implement. Public education in AI is an area that needs further research and investment, the team says. The Ethics Lab recently launched the AI, Ethics, & Health Initiative, building a course which incorporates theory with exercises, projects, and guest speakers who are inside the new world of AI and health.
The course’s mission is “getting ahead of the curve,” according to de Lara—to nurture future health care professionals and industry leaders, right when the world is at the cusp of this technological inflection point. Enrollment in the course has maxed out for two semesters in a row, and there’s a waitlist.
Georgetown’s interdisciplinary approach embraces the principle that good AI use requires strengthening our human ties: taking the time to cultivate channels of communication among researchers and practitioners from different fields, between providers and patients, and from experts to the public on benefits and risks. It also means giving the public the forum to seek avenues of redress when AI systems go awry.
What dictates the impact of AI isn’t just advancement in computing power, but also the quality of human input, from designers to reviewers to the end user. As much as the world is quick to experiment with AI, the hype should be tempered with caution.
“There is no such thing as a neutral AI tool,” de Lara says. n
For sources and other AI research links at Georgetown, see our digital magazine.
< Bridging disciplines and distance >
Virtual interprofessional program highlights the School of Nursing’s trailblazing role in online learning
By Sara Piccini | Design By Shikha Savdas
On a telehealth visit, family nurse practitioner Elke Zschaebitz performs an intake interview with a patient named Paula, currently pregnant with her fourth child. Paula, recently arrived in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley as a migrant worker, speaks only Spanish, so the two women converse through an interpreter.
Paula has not seen a health care practitioner since coming to the U.S. three months earlier. She is suffering from throbbing tooth pain in her left molar and has gestational diabetes. Her blood sugar testing and insulin dosing are irregular. She also has been taking medication for depression, but only sporadically. Near the end of the interview, she discloses that her youngest child, a 3-year-old, has stopped communicating.
Paula and her husband do not own a car and have no health insurance. Given these barriers, what is the most effective treatment plan?
In a virtual meeting room, 12 students vigorously debate the answer to this question, guided by a facilitator. They come from institutions across the U.S. and represent a range of disciplines—nursing, social work, occupational therapy, speech therapy, dentistry, and more.
The students are enrolled in an innovative interprofessional training program called VIPE (Virtual Interprofessional Education), launched in 2017. Designed to promote collaborative problem-solving, VIPE is built around complex cases such as Paula’s. Although they are simulations, the cases are based on real-life examples.
As one of seven founding members of the VIPE Consortium, the Georgetown School of Nursing has played a pivotal role in the development of the program, which has grown to include more than 60 universities in 30 countries.
In November, three School of Nursing faculty members—Pamela Biernacki, Lois Wessel, and Elke Zschaebitz—were honored with the Georgetown Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award for their work in advancing the VIPE program.
“Within the larger Georgetown community, we’ve been trailblazers in hybrid learning and remote learning,” says School of Nursing Dean Roberta Waite. “It’s awesome to see our faculty leveraging their expertise within this dynamic learning environment, where they can teach and support others in a myriad of ways.
“I’m very proud to see their skill set and their knowledge valued and recognized in a larger domain.”
‘A snowball effect’
The World Health Organization and leading professional groups have long recognized that interprofessional education (IPE) is a critical element in health care training.
“IPE prepares students from different disciplines to work collaboratively in teams,” says Biernacki, associate professor of nursing and assistant dean for innovation and program development. “According to the National Academy of Medicine, it improves
the quality of patient care, lowers health care costs, and ensures we’re not redundant in how we use our resources.”
Because of its benefits, Biernacki notes, IPE is now an accreditation requirement in most health care educational institutions in the U.S., as well as internationally.
However, there are roadblocks to the delivery of effective interprofessional education. Faculty members in rural settings, for example, may not be able to gather students from a variety of specialties in the same physical space. On the other hand, students in more urban settings can miss out on learning about the particular issues faced by providers in underserved areas that are sparsely populated.
Overcoming these obstacles was the impetus for the creation of VIPE. At a time when the word “zoom” was commonly accepted to mean moving fast, the original VIPE consortium members envisioned online learning as a powerful tool for team-building and collaborative problem-solving.
“We develop cases that students don’t typically get to see during their education, and they certainly don’t get to sit at the table with people from all these disciplines,” Biernacki says. “So they dig deep to come up with a variety of solutions. We try really hard to make them realize there’s not one answer.”
Biernacki and Zschaebitz credit Mary Showstark, a faculty member in Yale University’s physician assistant program, for getting VIPE off the ground. “I want to give
kudos to Mary—this was her brainchild,” says Zschaebitz, assistant professor of nursing. “After that, it was kind of a snowball effect.”
In addition to the rapid growth of consortium partners in the U.S., VIPE has expanded overseas, most notably with the AfriVIPE program, centered in South Africa and including programs in Zimbabwe and Kenya as well.
‘The magic of the tiny room’
The VIPE curriculum, used by all member universities in the consortium, includes asynchronous and synchronous elements. Students first engage in asynchronous learning activities, including reading through case study materials and viewing the case simulation, as well as watching video interviews with professionals from different disciplines describing their roles and responsibilities.
VIPE coordinators then stage a one-day synchronous event with approximately 200 students. They first meet in a large online space for introductions, then break out into small groups of 12–15 to discuss the assigned case study and come up with a treatment plan. After an hour, everyone reconvenes to present their small-group findings to the entire class.
Zschaebitz has taken the lead on developing a number of the VIPE case simulations, drawing on her professional experience using storytelling and first-person narratives to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in the patient-provider relationship.
“It’s awesome to see our faculty leveraging their expertise within this dynamic learning environment, where they can teach and support others in a myriad of ways.”
< DEAN ROBERTA WAITE >
“The process is very collaborative,” Zschaebitz empha sizes. “We all get together and hash out the details.”
Working within a limited budget, Zschaebitz often uses non-actors, recruiting colleagues and even family members. “In one case, my dad played an elderly person in a rural area afraid to go out because of COVID.” Surprisingly, she says, the non-actors generally come across as more realistic. “When we used actors, it wasn’t as authentic as I thought it would be. They were more focused on reading the lines, rather than just being organic and telling the story.”
for all advanced practice nursing students. Beginning in Fall 2024, VIPE will also be a requirement in the undergraduate nursing program.
More than a thousand Georgetown students have participated in VIPE thus far, and evidence gathered through course evaluations and student comments clearly demonstrates the program’s effectiveness.
Built on actual cases, the VIPE scenarios incorporate the social determinants of health as well as layering in specific issues that involve different specialties. In one simulation, for example, Zschaebitz used a case involving a child with autism whose family had moved to a rural, underserved area in West Virginia.
“We added aspects for disciplines that we needed to pull in, like dentistry—there was a question about whether the child’s teeth should be bonded because they didn’t brush them that well,” she says.
“When the students enter the breakout room, they’re all strangers. The facilitator is there to draw out the students and get them talking about their experiences,” she explains. “We’ll get some profound statements, like we did discussing a case concerning opioid addiction, when a student who was a veteran revealed that he had once struggled with substance abuse. Once it gets very real, the students become even more engaged.
“That’s the magic of the tiny room,” Zschaebitz continues. “At the end of the session, we have an individualized plan of care that every provider would want—it’s so comprehensive and detailed—from all these students learning from each other and thinking outside the box.”
“I absolutely loved VIPE,” says Jillian Murphy Deaton (G’22), an inaugural Johnson/Turpin fellow in the Family Nurse Practitioner program. “It was so great to meet students from other schools and other specialties, learn their capabilities and see how they would approach a case from their end. The virtual aspect allowed us all to be together even though we’re far apart.”
Deaton’s small group encompassed a variety of disciplines—including students training as social workers, case managers, physician assistants, and nurses. Their case involved a student who played sports, suffered an injury, and subsequently became addicted to opioids. The young woman’s mother brought her to the emergency room after she overdosed.
“The PAs were more like hospitalists, talking about inpatient treatment, while the social work students were already thinking about resources for family counseling and how to prevent the situation in the future,” Deaton says.
“When we first started dissecting this case together, we didn’t fully understand each other’s roles. I was a few terms away from graduating, and I thought, ‘I know what social workers do.’ But no, I didn’t—I had no idea about all they’re trained to do, how they fit into the clinical picture, and the vast magnitude of resources they have.
Photo: Phil Humnicky
Teaching transformed
When the Virtual Interprofessional Education Consortium launched in 2017, Georgetown School of Nursing (then the School of Nursing & Health Studies) was already in the vanguard as a provider of distance-based learning programs.
Since 2011, Georgetown faculty have designed, developed and taught graduate nursing education to students across the country through an innovative hybrid-distance format. “We have been able to bring a Georgetown nursing education to rural areas and other locations where students would not have had the opportunity for advanced practice nursing education,” says Debora Dole, professor and vice dean of academic affairs at the School of Nursing.
The initial move to online learning was understandably challenging for faculty accustomed to sharing their expertise via classroom lectures. “You have to not just be on your game, you also have to understand how student learning takes place in this environment,” Dole notes.
“And at that time the technology was changing rapidly. A lot of folks didn’t have access to reliable high-speed internet. Platforms which were used to deliver content and support video conferencing for synchronous learning were also changing,” she continues. “Faculty had to learn a different skillset, mastering technology, on top of new pedagogical skills.”
Above and beyond these challenges, the program designers needed to determine how to incorporate essential hands-on clinical training for students. The answer: on-campus Objective Clinical Intensives (OCIs) for each graduate specialty, where students work through simulations and interact with standardized patients to develop competency and confidence. Nursing faculty then oversee clinical placements for each student, identifying and vetting sites within an appropriate geographical radius.
“It’s a unique aspect that other early distance programs didn’t have, and another key piece of how Georgetown’s program was really groundbreaking,” Dole says.
As Dole emphasizes, the move online has transformed nursing education. “This format really puts students at the center of the learning environment,” she says. “The pedagogy is completely different— faculty are not just transmitting information, they facilitate deep learning. Students can learn visually, they can learn tactilely, they can learn through discussion or narrative assignments.”
Over time, particularly as technology has vastly improved, the benefits of online education have become readily apparent even to early skeptics. “VIPE is a perfect example,” Dole says. “Teaching across the country, internationally, across disciplines—you would never get the opportunity to do that if you were constrained by your brick-andmortar classroom.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person education in March 2020, Dole and her colleagues were able to leverage their expertise gained from teaching approximately 50 online courses per semester.
“We held workshops and set up a buddy system, and distance-learning faculty held open office hours to support colleagues.
“CNDLS [Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship] was a huge help as well,” she adds. “They also were trying to build the plane as they were flying it.”
In the world of online education, the plane is now soaring. “Thinking about the future can be mind-blowing,” Dole says. “As we look at more nursing pathways, for example, there’s the opportunity to use virtual reality—having students in multiple locations participating together in some kind of simulated learning experience, learning from each other. We’re just at the very beginning.”
“It’s more than a one-day experience, it becomes a mindset,” Deaton continues. “If we don’t have a collaborative and interprofessional view, we truly isolate ourselves and think nursing is the be all, end all.
“There’s a lot we can do—everything can be permissible, but is it beneficial? Is it beneficial for me to take on the social worker aspect of a case and find the resources, or is it more beneficial for me to bring people in? For people who are very Type A like me, it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, I’m passing my patient on,’ but you’re not. You’re bringing someone else in to help.”
Deaton gives special praise to the VIPE small-group facilitators, faculty members from consortium universities who volunteer their time. “The facilitator makes sure that all voices are heard and we’re working on a level playing field,” she says. “It was a great experience learning not to just jump into the conversation, but to step back to really listen to those around us.”
Optimizing health
Biernacki and Zschaebitz both emphasize that VIPE has proven to be an invaluable educational opportunity for faculty as well.
“It’s amazing how much I have learned from having dental students in the room, for example, and I believe it’s reciprocal,” Biernacki says. “I remember one of the dental students assigned to a case involving the pregnant migrant worker hadn’t ever thought about the link between depression and poor hygiene, and how that could affect dental care.”
In developing VIPE case studies, Zschaebitz has intentionally introduced care management issues that many faculty may have little experience with. “My clinical expertise is working with people who are gender
“It was so great to meet students from other schools and other specialties, learn their capabilities and see how they would approach a case from their end. The virtual aspect allowed us all to be together even though we’re far apart.”
< JILLIAN MURPHY DEATON >
diverse. When I began creating my first VIPE case, I thought, ‘This is a very vulnerable population that a lot of people probably don’t know much about.’” She went on to produce a case study involving an 18-year-old woman, assigned male at birth, who was being abused by her mother’s boyfriend.
“The students learned a lot,” she says. “And I think the faculty learned even more.”
Georgetown’s pioneering role in VIPE reflects the broader educational mission of the School of Nursing and its fundamental commitment to promoting health equity.
“Nursing is about optimizing health, looking at the totality of the person—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually,” says Dean Waite. “At Georgetown that’s amplified because we infuse our educational processes with our core Jesuit values.
“It’s amplified in how we engage, how we deliver content, how we think about people, how we think about communities. It’s the framing that we use when we’re providing education—it’s really foundational,” she says.
VIPE is especially powerful, Waite says, because the program examines not just an individual patient’s situation, but the larger social structures that affect health.
“So much of health is focused on the individual, and that’s important,” she notes. “But the individual does not live in a vacuum. What the individual experiences depends upon the context they live in. It shapes and informs how they respond based on the tools that they have.
“So the structures we create—the resources, opportunities, policies—have a major impact on the trajectory of a person’s health.”
Beyond the Zoom room
Although VIPE is relatively new, there is already a wealth of anecdotal evidence about its impact for students graduating and entering practice.
Even before graduation, Jillian Deaton was able to apply lessons learned in a clinical situation. “I was in my last term—my integration term—and my preceptor had me see a patient that she knew was difficult.
“I walked in and the patient said, ‘I don’t know you and I don’t like you.’ What she was really telling me, without realizing it, was that she’d lost trust in medical providers because they hadn’t treated her correctly.”
Working with a pharmacist and a social worker, Deaton and her fellow providers were able to build some trust back by considering her whole situation, not just the problem she presented with on the day Deaton saw her. They were able to cut the cost of the patient’s medications from hundreds of dollars each month—which she couldn’t afford—to just 15 dollars a month. “Bringing in the pharmacy team was vital. VIPE helped me realize the external resources that I do have access to—before that I truly didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
More recently, Deaton was working with a clinic in an underserved area that decided to hire a social worker. “People in the clinic were saying, ‘I really don’t know how to work with her,’” Deaton remembers.
Deaton organized a medical provider meeting where the social worker could describe her role in detail. “I feel like I wouldn’t have known to do that if I hadn’t gone through VIPE,” she says.
“The social worker was amazing,” Deaton continues. “She had access to all kinds of medication programs, and taught us how to code appropriately for insurance. She was also great at end-of-life care planning, explaining DNRs. And she could have an hour slot with a patient, when I know I only have 15 to 20 minutes on a good day.”
Now living in Texas, Deaton has also joined the Georgetown School of Nursing faculty as an adjunct, teaching remotely. In the future she hopes to become a VIPE facilitator herself, giving back to the program she has found indispensable.
“I still use VIPE to this day—it’s like lightbulbs going off all the time,” Deaton says. “And I know it’s something that each student will use, whether they do so consciously or unconsciously.”
‘Juggernaut problems’
Building on its success, the VIPE program is now expanding beyond health professions, including emergency management and security personnel. “We’re working on an AfriVIPE case now involving flooding and disaster planning,” says Biernacki. “What are the real-world issues? For example, if you have a flood, how do people in wheelchairs get out? Health professionals want to know how to develop an evacuation plan.”
Parallel with VIPE’s expansion nationally and internationally, the Georgetown School of Nursing is currently engaging in discussion with other schools and programs within the university—particularly the School of Medicine, but also including law, business, and public policy— to create trans-disciplinary learning opportunities based on the VIPE model.
“There are elements of that already—such as the work of Vicki Gerard with the Health Justice Alliance and Michelle Roett with the new Center for Health Equity,” Waite says.
“It’s a great opportunity, and it needs to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible, from undergraduate to graduate learning,” she continues.
“Because of our structured education system, quite often we teach in silos,” says Waite. “But if we want to transform health, it’s important to bring together different disciplines, as VIPE does.
“Students are bringing their disciplinary lens and sharing how they might tackle a problem. What draws them to perform that action first? How do we learn from each other?
“We’re one of the richer countries in the world, yet we have some of the poorest health outcomes,” she says. “We all have to work together to solve these juggernaut problems we face today.” n
By Jane Varner Malhotra | Design By Sofia Velasquez
tories about birth are as old as humanity itself. They are universal, crossing every culture as they mark the breathtaking beginnings of new life. People tell these tales, from celebratory to tragic, as lessons, historic markers, memorable moments to help us understand the human condition. The accumulation of storytelling holds wisdom. Can this lore guide and improve health care?
After a traumatic experience with her first birth, Imani Cabassa-George knew she wanted to do things differently for her second one.
“The first time, I was in labor for 36 hours and it ended with an emergency C-section,” she recalls. The next time, she enlisted the help of a doula, who brought alternative pain relief methods and comforts like soothing aromatic oils to counter the normal hospital smells. The doula also helped Cabassa-George advocate for herself during labor, reminding her that she could ask medical providers to step out of the room when needed so that she and her husband could speak privately.
“I’m extremely thankful for doulas and doula programs that help Black women and any women navigate uncertainty in birth,” says Cabassa-George, who identifies as Afro-Latina.
Last year she served as the first graduate research assistant for the newly founded Georgetown–Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice (MHHJ). The unique center formed
by the two Washington, DC, universities launched in 2023 with a 3.5-year, $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, which supports communities through the arts and humanities. The center seeks to reduce health disparities in Washington by leveraging the critical inquiry methods at the heart of the humanities.
A Ph.D. candidate in Howard University’s Communication, Culture, and Media Studies program, Cabassa-George was a perfect fit for her new role with the center. “I was extremely interested because medical humanities involves storytelling. As a communications scholar, the combination of storytelling and health is important to me.”
Her research looks at how Black women use social media and storytelling to prioritize Black maternal health. High maternal mortality rates for Black women have plagued the nation—and the Washington, DC, area in particular—for decades, and Cabassa-George sees the potential for digital communities to help make a difference. Whereas in the past, people might have sat around the hearth or the well to share their birth stories, today many people are finding community online and swapping wisdom there, wisdom that can be lifesaving.
“I’m really interested in the agency that Black women use to navigate the maternal health crisis,” she says. “A lot of times, we hear stories about how providers just aren’t listening to Black women. There’s a lot of systemic injustice behind
this problem. But also we’ve seen a lot of Black women take agency over their situation by turning to social media for answers.”
Storytelling in the virtual sphere can have a major impact on health care, she notes.
“This is where digital humanities and storytelling come in. You see Black women going to social media and saying, ‘Hey, this is what happened with me and my provider. And here’s how I navigated the situation.’ These instances are really powerful for Black women, offering alternative birthing practices, and giving them what they need to face the uncertainties of maternal health.”
Partnering beyond the clinic doors
The field of medical humanities emerged on medical school campuses in the 1960s as a way to humanize what had become in many cases an overly clinical relationship between patient and physician. Since then the goals of the medical humanities have broadened, bringing together a variety of disciplines to offer a different, more complete picture of what is going on in health and health care. Medical humanities aims to understand health and medicine in a wide social, cultural, and historical context, through the lenses of ethics, philosophy, history,litera, cultural studies, religion, psychology, medical anthropology,
“Medical humanities is a field that teaches us that health and health care do not begin and end in the clinic or at the hospital doors,” says Lakshmi Krishnan, co-executive director of the center and founding director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative. “Health touches every aspect of our lives, and the medical humanities help make meaning out of that.”
A Georgetown University professor who specializes in cultural history of medicine and a board-certified physician in internal medicine, Krishnan co-leads the new center with Dana Williams, Howard University professor of AfricanAmerican literature and dean of the Graduate School. The two executive directors of the center were introduced several years ago by a mutual friend, and as humanities scholars they felt an immediate connection through personal and professional interests. A 30-minute meeting became a two-hour conversation as they shared stories of everything from literature to health care challenges faced by friends and family to the history of medicine uncovered in their archival work.
Soon after this memorable meeting, Williams invited Krishnan to participate in an annual Howard event called Disciplines in Dialogue.
“We intentionally put the STEM folks in conversation with the humanities folks, to mix things up,” says Williams. With
channels open and see what would unfold. When last year’s Mellon Grant opportunity emerged, they knew that through their friendship and shared expertise and values, there would be a way to build something transformative.
“Given her background in literature and medicine, it was a no-brainer for me to work with her on this project,” notes Williams, a former English professor. “We also share an interest in archive and narrative medicine and diagnoses. I knew we could make a difference in the way that people think about health and health justice. In that first conversation, we shared stories that were familiar in terms of misdiagnoses and delayed diagnoses. Often health providers are not informed enough by culture and by an understanding of how to take all people seriously.”
An important aspect of the MHHJ is impact. The co-founders and their teams are looking to understand and solve health problems creatively through the medical humanities, which is why “health justice” is part of the organization’s name. The center focuses in particular on health in Washington, DC, where the need is great.
“We’ve got a limited amount of time and multiple obligations,” says Williams. “So we picked the thing that will impact the people who need it most. We can’t think about the whole world’s health problems. But we see DC as a good example of what’s possible for a localized community. What are the data sets? What’s the methodology that you can use to begin to solve these problems? And for us it’s important for it to be transferable.”
A model for collaboration
The center hopes similar collaborations can be duplicated in other places, and the staff is carefully documenting how they are establishing themselves to help make this possible.
Linking the two universities, the unique endeavor focuses on reducing health disparities in DC and the surrounding area by leveraging the strengths of and differences between Howard, an historically Black college or university (HBCU), and Georgetown, a predominantly white institution (PWI).
“What does it mean for an HBCU and a PWI to be in conversation, both schools having med schools, both places having changing demographics, both places grappling with the changes in medicine?” Williams asks. In conversation with the Mellon Foundation through multiple iterations, the codirectors determined that an impact could be made through undergraduate education and medical schools. “Working on the grant forced us to sit and have that conversation to think about it structurally,” she says.
“A big part of what we see the center doing is putting together all of those people, all of those disciplines, all of those communities, all of those traditional and non-traditional aspects of wellness,” Williams adds. “We see ourselves asa confederating space. How do we put all of those aspects together and then make better health decisions?”
Georgetown currently offers a medical humanities minor, and Howard is setting up an interdisciplinary major in the field. The center is developing parallel undergraduate courses at the two universities with a potential for overlapping sessions held both virtually and at Georgetown’s Capitol Campus.
“Our downtown location is ideal for bringing together students from both Hilltops–Howard’s and Georgetown’s,” explains Alisa Byers, chief of staff at the MHHJ.
Neither university is predominant; both are equal participating partners in the collaboration. Some team members are employed through Georgetown and some through Howard, which ensures a balance between schools, Williams explains. The grant was divided equally. Each university offers four types of fellowships annually—community, postdoctoral, graduate, and faculty.
Students are involved with an ambassador program, assisting in the center’s communications, project management, research, and grant work. Faculty serve as research mentors and ambassadors as well, with 40 affiliated faculty members and university leadership from across disciplines at both institutions. An advisory board includes leaders from the DC area’s media and arts communities, as well as faculty and leadership from Georgetown and Howard’s schools of health and medicine. Coordination between the two universities is critical to the success of the joint venture.
“We want to make sure we operate as ONE,” Byers underscores.
DC lore
This year the MHHJ is hosting events and establishing fellowships for faculty, graduate students, and community members to develop and present projects around the theme of lore: uncovering and understanding the collective, generational wisdom around health in the community.
The center describes lore as that which is taught, and notes that lore contains “serious commentary, vital information, wit, imagination, and wonder.” These latter attributes are not normally associated with Western medicine, but the MHHJ makes the case that they are critical to community health and well-being.
“Sometimes we, as health care providers, dismiss this idea of lore or stories as being not scientific or not evidence-based,” says Krishnan. “And the point we are making is that lore absolutely constructs our reality, constructs our meanings. Lore is evidence.”
“And if anyone says that health care professionals don’t have lore, they’re lying,” she laughs. “We talk, and we have stories.”
To explore this topic with a health justice focus on the local community, the center asks, “What record does lore create and keep? How does lore influence health in Washington, DC, from the way Washingtonians conceptualize the history of health in the District, to stories circulated in communities, to shaping belief systems and health-related behaviors and offering multifaceted approaches to healing?”
Krishnan underscores the importance of health justice for the center.
“The justice piece is what really drives us; it’s the basis of what we are trying to do with all of our work. Health justice is also our orienting principle for how we build a team for the work that we are supporting and will support in the future. It’s our bat signal. Let’s bring folks into our big tent to do this kind of work.”
The work of the center includes measuring short- and longterm impact of the medical humanities on improving lives and enhancing health outcomes based on three pillars: research, public engagement, and education.
“These are not stand-alone pillars,” notes Byers. “They’re leaning on and integrated with each other.” For example, all research endeavors will include public engagement before and after the projects to help shape the work and ensure it is valuable to the community.
The fellows will be exploring the theme of lore to see how rich, expansive, and diverse ways of knowing can be used to improve policies for better health, Byers says. These changes might include adjusting clinical practice guidelines, or helping people think differently about how diagnoses are conducted and written.
“This is why it’s so important to amplify the stories of our community.”
Imani Cabassa-George, MPH
Alisa Byers, MPH
Photos: Phil Humnicky
Mystery, history, and justice
Georgetown School of Medicine fourth-year student Lizzie Torrez (M’24) first became interested in medical humanities through an elective course during her second year called Medicine and Mystery.
“Dr. Krishnan led the course and it was my first exposure to all of the other things that go into medicine that we don't necessarily get in the typical pre-clinical or medical curriculum,” she recalls. “Things like patient narrative, medical history, ethics, and even visual arts and poetry—all of these things that make medicine the art that it is.”
The course helped shape the kind of doctor she hopes to be, centering the Georgetown values of care of the whole person and health justice.
“For people who do diagnostic workups of patients, it’s a lot of detection and mystery solving,” says Torrez. “Being a detective is a good synopsis of what the physician has to do well, going far past the physical and superficial levels of a disease to really be able to treat someone. That ties in nicely to what the humanities allows us to do for patients. It’s taking care of who they are: their culture, their history, what their living situation looks like, and all of those things that allow us to put cura personalis into practice.”
Uncovering some of the troubled history of medicine, the course still inspires Torrez to prioritize health justice in her current and future work. As part of the course, Torrez created a podcast on the Mothers of Gynecology, recentering the stories of enslaved Black women who were used against their will for surgical research in the 1840s by J. Marion Sims, a white doctor who became known as the “father of gynecology.”
“We know some of their names because they were included in published reports: Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha,” Torrez notes. “The Mothers of Gynecology movement was started to reclaim that narrative of the women who were used and brutalized and experimented on to create this entire field.”
Torrez credits the medical humanities for opening up a broader picture of health and health justice and how she can make a difference as a future physician. She has high hopes for the Georgetown-Howard collaboration to offer this experience to others. She plans to specialize in OB-GYN in part because she sees the field as a place to have a big impact in health justice.
“If we fail to understand how deeply rooted systemic racism and injustices are, we will only solve the superficial issues. We need to recognize and to push ourselves to understand how deeply intertwined and ingrained these issues are in order to really start to uproot them.”
Cabassa-George believes that medical humanities and lore hold a key to unlocking liberation and ending injustice.
“We all can learn by seeing how Black women are able to navigate oppressive forces. It’s like the saying that when Black women are free, all women are free. The work is there and will benefit everyone.” n
The Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice offers some suggested resources for exploring the medical humanities:
Brotherless Night by V.V. “Sugi” Ganeshananthan
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigehisa Kuriyama
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century by Dorothy Roberts
How Cancer Crossed the Color Line by Keith Wailoo
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
“Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities” (essay) by Keith Wailoo
Radium Girls (play) by D.W. Gregory
Wit (movie based on a Pultizer Prizewinning play by Margaret Edson)
The DC mural used in this story was created by an artist collective called Trust Your Struggle.
STUDENT POINT OF VIEW
Student uses novel technologies in tumor biology labs
By Racquel Nassor
Zoe Malchiodi (MS’19, G’24), who earned her Ph.D. in tumor biology in May, has always been interested in the way tumors outsmart the body. Now she’s performing award-winning research on pancreatic cancer cells and the immune system.
Recently named the 2023–4 Matt Riddle Scholar for the Metropolitan Washington Chapter (MWC) of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation, Malchiodi was awarded $15,000 to complete her doctoral dissertation research.
For 55 years in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, the MWC of the ARCS Foundation has provided over $7 million in financial resources to more than 600 scholars advancing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
“It is a great honor to have the importance of my work recognized,” Malchiodi says.
The foundation has been supporting Georgetown University STEM graduate students since 1973 and undergraduate students since 2012. Currently, the award helps Malchiodi cover the costs of her experiments performing novel spatial analyses of natural killer (NK) cells—the white blood cells involved in eliminating diseased cells—to assess gene expression in human pancreatic cancer samples.
Mentorship encourages creativity
Malchiodi believes NK cells have the potential to change how we approach developing new therapeutic tools to treat pancreatic cancer.
Recent graduate Zoe Malchiodi, Ph.D. (MS’19, G’24), was named the 2023–4 Matt Riddle Scholar for the Metropolitan Washington Chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation. The award funds her crucial research preformed at Georgetown University assessing natural killer cells in pancreatic cancer samples.
“I have always been interested in examining factors within tumors that enhance cancer cells to grow,” she notes. “My mentor, Dr. Louis Weiner [the director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center], taught me how to be more creative with my research ideas and encouraged me to always use novel technologies that emerge to help answer important research questions.”
“I’ve learned how to be a better communicator about my research and how to think critically about the impact my research has in a broader context.”
“Pancreatic cancer is so difficult to treat,” she notes. Between 2013 and 2019 the American Cancer Society reported pancreatic cancer’s five-year survival rate at 50% overall. “I wanted to further understand how our immune system—particularly NK cells—function in this disease and if there are possible ways to enhance their anti-tumor immune effects.”
“Hopefully,” Malchiodi says, “our findings can also be applicable to other aggressive solid tumors.”
Growing her passion
Malchiodi has followed her interest in understanding disease over the course of her studies. After graduating from Boston University’s biochemistry and molecular biology bachelor’s program in 2016 and working for two years at University of Miami as a research associate, she began her doctoral research.
While at Georgetown, she published several papers supporting her thesis and received the 2022 NCI Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for doctoral candidates researching and training in a scientific-related field (with priority given to cancer researchers).
As she earned her doctorate in Georgetown’s tumor biology program in the Biomedical Graduate Education program, Malchiodi completed a two-year rigorous course schedule focused on the clinical-translational facets of cancer biology.
She particularly enjoyed the Current Topics in Cancer Research course, a “journal club-style class where students learn to critically evaluate recent publications in the literature in different areas of research in the tumor biology field.”
Recently, she presented a paper about “CAR-T cells [T cells from patients engineered with genes to target protein receptors specific to their cancer cells] and potential ways to increase their potency during manufacturing and therapy. It was interesting to discuss the research presented in the manuscript and how it can be applicable to a variety of cancers.”
Malchiodi says the course “allows us to be up-to-date with current advances in the field and teaches us the importance of understanding the rationale behind groundbreaking research in the field.”
Ultimately, Malchiodi’s commitment to researching tumor biology is driven by her enjoyment of pursuing scientific curiosity through rigorous experimentation. “I wanted to understand tumor cells’ mechanisms to potentially find a weakness to target,” she says, “and then we can share our knowledge with others inside and outside our field.”
Importance of storytelling
Malchiodi advises Georgetown students looking to apply for research grants or awards “to contextualize your research in the big picture as it’s easy to get lost in the nuances of your own work.”
“Once you understand that rationale, it’s easier to share your story to a broader audience as scientific communication and storytelling is an important aspect of grant writing.”
Malchiodi says that Georgetown has been a wonderful place to learn and grow. “I’ve met many people inside and outside the biomedical sciences,” she says. “I’ve learned how to be a better communicator about my research and how to think critically about the impact my research has in a broader context.” n
Zoe Malchiodi uses novel technologies to perform doctoral dissertation research in tumor cell biology at Georgetown University’s New Research Building.
Celebrating 40 years of student-run emergency care
By Heather Wilpone-Welborn
Over four decades ago, a group of Georgetown undergraduate students started a medical ambulance service to provide faster response to emergency calls on campus. Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service (GERMS) has since grown into one of the largest student-run ambulance services among U.S. colleges and universities.
In 1987, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia, then dean of Student Affairs, presented GERMS with an Outstanding Student Activity Award and worked to secure the organization additional funding, including subsidized housing to continue their work over the summer. In April 1990, DeGioia was named an honorary member of GERMS.
“My GERMS days were the foundation of my professional career, and I’m thankful for those who went before and those who have kept it alive.” —Gates Richards (C’95)
Run entirely by undergraduates, GERMS provides free, around-the-clock emergency services to the campus and surrounding neighborhoods of Burleith and Foxhall.
Bob Doherty (C’83, M’87) is credited with founding GERMS in 1982. Faculty physicians helped the initial GERMS members develop protocols and write training materials. All participants needed to pass an EMT test.
The following spring, GERMS members acquired their first ambulance, a converted hearse. Later that year, they answered their first official emergency dispatch from a person who was suffering from chest discomfort and pain. By March 1984, all emergency calls on campus were routed to GERMS.
GERMS now runs a 24/7 service most weeks of the year. The student volunteers operate two ambulances, the oldest of which has responded to more than 3,000 service calls.
Although many students studying nursing or interested in medical school join GERMS to gain clinical experience, students studying humanities, business, or law also seek to become new inductees.
Gates Richards (C’95) was an English major in the College of Arts & Sciences when he participated in GERMS. “My GERMS days were the foundation of my professional career, and I’m thankful for those who went before and those who have kept it alive,” said Richards, now associate director at the National Outdoor Leadership School’s Wilderness Medicine.
Former GERMS participants have gone on to work as EMTs, nurses, firefighters, and doctors across the country. n
Photos: Georgetown University
The first GERMS graduation was held at the end of the 1982–1983 academic year and the program is still going strong today.
GUMC hosts national scholars program
By Lauren M. Poteat and Kat Zambon
Developed by Congress in 1971 to recruit, train, and retain health professionals committed to underserved populations, the Area Health Education Center (AHEC) program uses resources from academic medicine to serve local community health needs in almost every state and now the District of Columbia.
AHEC Scholars is a national program for health profession students interested in gaining additional knowledge and experience in rural and urban underserved
settings. The new DC program—hosted by the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center—is available to students in the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing.
Over a two-year period, AHEC Scholars have the opportunity to shadow clinicians and learn about core topic areas including social determinants of health, behavioral health, cultural humility, interprofessional education, practice transformation, COVID-19, and opioid use disorder.
“My experiences as an AHEC scholar have definitely impacted my approach to patient care and my goals as a healthcare provider,” says Dana Bulik (C’16, G’24), a student in the women’s health nurse practitioner program. “I enjoyed working at a variety of clinical sites in DC each with its own unique patient population, and I know this experience will help me to become a more conscientious, compassionate, and well-rounded provider in the future.” n
Understanding community needs to improve health care
By Nowshin Chowdhury
Since 2012, the School of Health’s Department of Health Management and Policy has supported MedStar Health’s triennial Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). The purpose of the assessment is to identify and address the health needs of the underserved communities served by the system’s 10 hospitals in the mid-Atlantic region.
Georgetown School of Health students collect the primary data and synthesize the secondary data.
“We’re interviewing people in the community and trying to make sense of what’s happening that’s keeping people from achieving optimal health and well-being,” says Dean Christopher J. King. “And on the other side of that, we want to be sure that we are working with the community to co-create interventions to make sustainable change to improve health outcomes.”
In recent years, student data collectors began to include questions around social justice, racism, discrimination, and issues related to being low income.
The expanded 2024 report includes longitudinal analyses comparing data from the first CHNA report. It also captures the trends in health care over the years in the service areas.
According to King, one of the report’s key findings is that the age-adjusted death rate due to heart diseases and cancer has declined in all service areas since the first report was released in 2012. n
Dana Bulik (C’16, G’24), a former student in the women’s health nurse practitioner program, relishes experiences gained through the AHEC Scholars Program.
More than a decade of summer camp fun
By Gabrielle Barone
Being a kid in the summer means time for fun and games, but many families aren’t able to afford organized summer camps. That’s why the Georgetown HOYA Clinic began a summer sports camp in 2012 just for local kids experiencing homelessness.
Each year, roughly 60 School of Medicine students act as camp counselors for young participants connected to The Triumph, a short-term family housing organization in Washington, DC’s Ward 8 that has housed one of the HOYA Clinic locations since 2019.
While the camp was founded around sports activities like basketball, four square, kickball, and jump-roping, camp experiences have grown to include sack races, arts and crafts, and swimming. A recurring “camper favorite” tradition is the annual Egg Drop Challenge, in which campers craft vessels to
safely cradle a raw egg as they drop it off a 30-foot high fire truck ladder.
One element of the camp activities is especially important for underserved communities: basic water safety.
“Each year, it’s encouraging to see campers gain confidence during the pool session,” says Michael Covell (M’26), last year’s co-coordinator for HoyaMed Summer Sports Camp. Some campers “are initially hesitant to get in the pool, but throughout the morning they get more comfortable and begin jumping in, swimming, and loving the session.”
Covell explains that each camp session requires significant preparation. Organizers begin working with The Triumph in May, planning logistics, gathering park permits, and eventually registering campers.
It’s fun for the kids, but the summer camp is also a welcome event for new and returning medical students.
“Our summer camp is a great way for current medical students to step back from their studies and serve the communities in which they live,” Covell says. “A lot of medical school feels like preparation for a future of service—our summer camp is a rewarding way to connect in the present and grow our relationship outside of typical HOYA Clinic operations.” n
Photos: Tyisha Henderson
Participants and counselors alike enjoy time together each summer at the HoyaMed Summer Sports Camp.
Wooden Spoon Award celebrates ‘heartfelt medical care’
By Lauren M. Poteat
A celebration of thoughtful communication between medical professionals and their patients, the Edward M. Kovach Cura Personalis Endowed Lecture and its signature Wooden Spoon Award were created in 2019 in memory of Edward M. Kovach (C’57, L’60), who died in 2017 after a three-and-a-half-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
“My dad loved Georgetown. He lived in Healy and used to go into Gaston Hall to practice his saxophone. Georgetown changed his life,” shares his daughter, Alexandra Kovach du Pont.
“When my dad was first diagnosed, he only wanted treatment from Georgetown,” she continues. “His doctors and caregivers always made sure he knew he mattered. That’s what this lecture series is all about—heartfelt medical care.”
Suffering from an aggressive condition with an often swift finish, Kovach decided to place his trust in the medical care of Dr. John L. Marshall, a gastrointestinal cancer specialist who directs the Ruesch Center for the Cure of GI Cancers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. The care he received there extended his life for another three and a half years.
“It’s almost unheard of to live so long with stage IV pancreatic cancer,” says his daughter. “My dad felt well enough to play golf and that was a big deal. Thanks to Georgetown, he was given more time with his family. He said those were some of the best years of his life.”
In addition to golf, Kovach also continued his woodworking hobby, whittling handmade wooden spoons that he would give to his doctors as a thank you and make with his grandchildren as a rite of passage. For this reason, one of the highlights of the annual lecture is the presentation of a Wooden Spoon Award, given as a symbol of care and nurturing.
“This Wooden Spoon Award represents my husband’s legacy at Georgetown, the university that meant so much to him,” shares his wife, Kathleen Kovach. “Inspired by his love of woodworking, each Wooden Spoon Award is an original piece. We hope that this award motivates current and aspiring medical professionals and influences the way they care.”
Marshall, Kovach’s physician, received the first Wooden Spoon at the inaugural lecture. After skipping the series in 2020 due to the pandemic, the lecture series honored Aiwu Ruth He in 2021, and Joseph Roswarski in 2023. Roswarski oversaw the non-Hodgkin lymphoma treatment of U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md). The next lecture will be held in Fall 2024. n
“This Wooden Spoon Award represents my husband’s legacy at Georgetown, the university that meant so much to him. Inspired by his love of woodworking, each Wooden Spoon Award is an original piece.”
—Kathleen Kovach
While undergoing stage IV pancreatic cancer treatment at Georgetown Lombardi, Edward M. Kovach (C’57, L’60) spent much of his free time in his woodworking studio.
Collaborating on HIV/AIDS pandemic research
By Racquel Nassor
In April 2023, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) designated the Center for Global Health Policy & Politics at Georgetown as a United Nations Collaborating Center.
Under Matthew Kavanagh’s leadership, director of the new Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, which bridges the O’Neill Institute at the Law Center and School of Health, and assistant professor of global health in the School of Health, the Collaborating Center works to address inequalities driving the continuing pandemic by advancing policy and laws impacting HIV/AIDS.
U.N. agency, Swiss government, and funder grants enabled the establishment of the Global Council on Inequality, AIDS and Pandemics, chaired by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Sir Michael Marmot, University College London epidemiology professor; and Monica Geingos, entrepreneur, lawyer, and former first lady of Namibia.
The center is also documenting and improving international HIV-related clinical, financial, and legal policies with the HIV Policy Lab—a collaborative effort between Georgetown University, UNAIDS, and the Global Network of People Living with HIV.
With the Lab’s data, Kavanagh, Charles Birungi, Santiago Cunial, and council member John Ataguba, published Income inequality and pandemics: insights from HIV/AIDS and COVID-19—a multicountry observational study showing that “countries with higher income inequality have seen higher rates of HIV infection, higher rates of AIDS deaths, and higher rates of COVID-19 deaths.”
“We are uncovering the ways that income inequality is actually disabling effective pandemic response,” explains Kavanagh. In addition, the center investigated how laws targeting LGBTQIA+ people can impact HIV risk. The Global HIV Policy Lab Report found that eliminating laws criminalizing LGBTQIA+ people results in “higher rates of HIV testing among populations, higher rates of getting on antiretroviral treatment, and higher rates of effective viral suppression to stop the transmission of HIV.” Kavanagh notes that the center’s research is “already impacting how people are thinking about their AIDS interventions.”
By promoting community-led monitoring and social science research on the political determinants of health, the center continues the O’Neill Institute’s mission by advancing laws and policies tackling international health challenges.
“The Center for Global Health Policy & Politics reflects our vision for an equitable and just world where all people can achieve optimal health and well-being,” says Christopher J. King, dean of the School of Health. “Under Matthew Kavanagh’s leadership, faculty and students have unique opportunities to advance a global public health agenda through policies and practices that promote social justice.” n
Small steps, big impact
By Gabrielle Barone
Living in Washington, DC, Julianne Kiene (G’18, M’23) noticed that the local unhoused population often didn’t have shoes and suffered from untreated foot problems. While attending the School of Medicine and working at the HOYA Clinic, she founded the Hoya Foot Care Clinic: specific events to provide shoes, podiatric care, and education for unhoused patients.
Kiene chose to attend Georgetown for its dedication to service. “I knew I would meet people who were equally likeminded about providing health care to everyone,” she says. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she had more time to focus on launching the clinic with Byron Rosenthal (M’24), Schulyer Gaillard (M’24), and Nina Kishore (M’27). The first clinic took place in Spring 2021 at the Harriet Tubman Women’s Shelter in DC’s Ward 7. There are now monthly events at a number of locations, which cumulatively helped over 400 patients last year and have been in such high demand that they now have wait lists.
Kiene, who will begin her dermatology residency in the fall, says the condition of someone’s feet can reveal significant medical conditions, including circulation issues and diabetes. She can also learn a lot from the treatment of wounds and calluses.
Foot clinic patients receive care from medical student volunteers, who are overseen by podiatry residents and attending physicians, who can provide prescriptions or referrals, if necessary.
In addition to learning from the doctors, Kishore, a previous HOYA clinic coordinator, says the students learn from watching their attendings and each other. The patient interactions and clinical experience help the students apply their medical training while learning from and serving the community.
“For medical students, the more patients and people from different walks of life you meet, the better you’ll be able to care for your future patients and understand the complexities of their health needs,” says Kishore.
Though they don’t need a traditional hospital environment to treat patients, clinic volunteers are careful to provide space and privacy for those wary of the vulnerability of exposing their feet for treatment. Working in a nontraditional environment also allows the student volunteers to provide an immediate improvement to a person’s comfort with minimal disruption or cost.
“The way we take care of people has a significant impact on how they move forward with their day,” Kishore says. n
In addition to treatments, the clinic provides shoes, socks, and gift bags with basic foot care supplies. Donations can be made to Georgetown’s HOYA Clinic directly and through the Foot Care Clinic’s Give Campus campaign.
Bonding around the bonfire
By Gabrielle Barone
School of Medicine students had the chance to breathe in some fresh mountain air last September on the medical student weekend retreat at Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. For the first time since the pandemic, students had 25 hours to take part in hikes, laugh around a bonfire, and sleep in a cabin.
In addition to the fun and bonding, there was time for reflection, introspection, and “contemplation in action.”
“Medical school is to train people who can enter into healing relationships with people in need,” says Father James Shea, S.J., the medical center’s Catholic chaplain, “which means the medical professional needs to reflect and grow in order to have the capacity and compassion to build a healing relationship with their patients.”
While their experiences in medical school varied, students had “so many similar patterns,” says Anna Stephan (M’25), a third year medical student who attended the retreat. “Everyone wanted to slow down from their busy medical school schedules and reflect in community.”
Stephan, who leads a weekly virtual Ignatian Examen (prayerful reflection) for medical students, noted that participants were all open to doing an Examen around a bonfire on the first night.
“It really hit me when I looked up and I saw everyone with their eyes closed,” Stephan says. “I could feel a sense of peace and calm, and felt very connected to the people around me.”
Participants also heard talks from Eileen Moore, M.D., associate dean of community education and advocacy, and Myles Sheehan, S.J., director of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, about faith in medicine. Shea led a reflection on using one’s talents in service to others.
“Medical school can be quite overwhelming,” says Stephan. “You tend to be focused directly ahead, and I sometimes feel like I have blinders on. It was great to see retreat participants open up and lean into reflecting. By the end of the weekend there was a communal deep breath… and we asked ‘How can we preserve the peace and stillness?’”
During the unstructured time, participants considered their place in medicine and what they hope to contribute, as well as how to create a contemplative practice to sustain their difficult work.
The retreat is “more than [just] a break, it’s integral to what we should be doing as we form physicians,” Shea says. Medicine is “a profession that really calls on them to have the capacity to work deeply with people… they’re invited into a relationship that very few people are invited into.” n
Photos: Anna Stephan
During the Fall 2023 retreat at Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center, School of Medicine students enjoyed time for conversation and reflection, both indoors and outdoors. School of Medicine retreats recently received a gift from the Torque Foundation.
‘I
believe that community health has been my calling’
By Lauren M. Poteat
Georgetown Health Magazine recently sat down with Michelle A. Roett (M’03), professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, who established Georgetown’s Center for Health Equity to address education and training on eliminating health disparities in Washington, DC.
What made you decide on Georgetown for medical school?
I wanted to be at a place where I could dedicate my career to eliminating health disparities in underserved populations and marginalized communities. At Georgetown I really felt like I could make a difference, and that as a Black woman, my voice mattered. When I was a medical student, family medicine resident, and Community Health fellow at Georgetown, I was embedded clinically throughout the DC area, including Wards 7 and 8. I really felt like this was my community. I still do.
What motivated you to establish the Center for Health Equity in 2022?
Based on my own background, I’ve always had an interest in and dedication to addressing social determinants of health. I believe that community health has been my calling, working toward eliminating health disparities and understanding community needs from a patient’s perspective. I formed the Center
for Health Equity so that our programming could support learners, faculty, and staff in longitudinal community engagement to improve health outcomes. We coordinate, train, and evaluate extensive student opportunities such as the HOYA Clinic. Since 2007, HOYA Clinic has grown to be an umbrella organization with multiple community engagement opportunities for students to serve DC and have meaningful longitudinal relationships with community partners and clients.
How would you like to see the center evolve in the future?
I would like to see fully endowed scholarships and awards that recognize students’ commitment to lifelong community service and advancing health equity. They should feel valued and rewarded for their career choice. It’s important that we lift up those who are dedicated to serving others and eliminating disparities.
You do a lot in the community. How do you recharge your own emotional battery?
I always say to students that you have to find your own fuel and fire. For me, it’s spending time with family and friends. As a family physician, I am fortunate that my patients have often been with me for 10–20 years. Whenever we reconnect it brings me a lot of joy. n
Michelle A. Roett, M.D., MPH (M’03), founder of the Center for Health Equity, is also medical director of the HOYA Clinic. Located at The Triumph, a short-term family housing program in Ward 8, the HOYA Clinic was formed to impact better health outcomes throughout the city.
ALUMNI CONNECTIONS
Professional doctor, amateur musician
By Racquel Nassor
Daniel Levine (M’80, R’84, Parent’12), psychiatrist and founding member of Maryland-based Old Georgetown Mental Health Associates, LLC, is grateful to be able to play the bassoon in a community orchestra as fine as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Philharmonia.
Representing a wide range of professions, the NIH Philharmonia musicians volunteer their time to play in the orchestra. They’ve performed free, publicly available orchestral concerts for 19 seasons.
Noting that his fellow musicians are “great, dedicated, interesting people,” Levine says that the real force behind the NIH Philharmonia is its founder, music director, and conductor, Nancia DAlimonte, who is “so creative, so energetic, and so dedicated.”
“It’s wonderful—particularly as an amateur—to be able to play at that high level, and I’m very thankful for that opportunity,” he shares.
Levine appreciates how donations collected at the NIH Philharmonia concerts benefit programs like The Children’s Inn at NIH—a nonprofit that provides free home-like residential services for children and young adult NIH patients. He explains their work gives the musicians “that additional bonus of knowing your efforts are also benefiting these great programs.”
But playing with the NIH Philharmonia isn’t just about giving back to the community for Levine; he also appreciates the challenges of its technical rigor. “Part of my gratitude about being in the NIH orchestra—and working with our specific conductor—is that we get to play bucket-list pieces. Most non-professional orchestras would not dare try Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ or Bartók’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’— two notoriously difficult orchestral pieces,” he notes.
While “playing music does not directly impact my psychiatric practice,” Levine says, “it does provide an important outlet for me, and helps me be a more rounded person.”
So it’s no surprise that he played the bassoon even as a busy Georgetown student. With a few other woodwind players in the School of Medicine, “we would do some informal pickup chamber music in the lecture hall during lunch,” he says.
Having first learned to play the bassoon in junior high school, he hoped to play in a quality orchestra like the NIH Philharmonia. When choosing his career path, Levine recalls his bassoon teacher, Carmela Echo, explaining that “you can’t be a musician and be a doctor as a hobby, but you can become a doctor and still be an amateur musician.” n
Photo: Phil Humnicky
Psychiatrist Daniel Levine (M’80, R’84, Parent’12) has long enjoyed having a musical outlet. He now plays the bassoon for the NIH Philharmonia in his free time.
ALUMNI CONNECTIONS
Filmmaker called to nursing
By Leslye Colvin
After earning a degree in film production and working for five years in documentary filmmaking and a variety of digital media areas, Isabella “Izzy” Seddon (MS’23) was called to help people more directly through nursing. She selected Georgetown’s Master of Science Entry to Nursing Practice Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL) Program after learning about the research opportunities available.
Seddon particularly appreciated the opportunity to work closely with her Georgetown professors. When Assistant Professor of Nursing Mirabal Beltran needed a videographer and photographer for her research, Seddon stepped up, eventually assisting her with community-based research.
While at Georgetown, she participated in a public health clinical rotation where she shadowed nurses in Arlington Public Schools and was awarded a grant from Sigma Theta Tau to attend the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting and Expo. The event’s public health film festival affirmed Seddon’s desire to share stories that are not often heard, merging her interests in public health and filmmaking.
In addition, Seddon traveled to Tanzania with a small group of Georgetown graduate students and faculty. During their trip, they met with Tanzanian health professionals and learned how public health is practiced in the rural village.
“Because we live in a very developed country, we think about the things impacting people from
a public health standpoint in a hypothetical way,” explains Seddon. “But access to clean water, or food sources, is a real challenge for these villagers; they rely on the state of the environment to help them thrive. If a big storm comes, we just go inside, but for a lot of these people, their houses get ruined, and their crops are torn down.”
Seddon sees Pedro Arrupe, S.J.’s desire to form people for others unfolding in both of her career paths. “I have always liked helping the underdog. That is why I created content for nonprofits; I get to share stories not often heard. In my nursing practice the same is true as nurses help others day in and day out,” she shares.
Next, she will complete a year-long nurse residency in the emergency room of Community Medical Center in Toms River, New Jersey. “Public health is my passion and I’m excited to be part of an Emergency Department,” she adds. “It’s like a pathway into public health because you get to see everything impacting the community. I’m curious to see what the Toms River community is facing right now and how I can help.” n
Thanks to her background in documentary filmmaking and photography, Isabella “Izzy” Seddon (MS’23) was able to chronicle her trip to Tanzania with fellow nursing students. Her video can be viewed online within our digital magazine.
Tools of the Trade
Interview by Nowshin Chowdhury
Jessica Collins, R.N. (NHS’21), Travel Nurse
Originally from Buffalo, New York, Jessica Collins chose Georgetown so that she could pursue both nursing and premed, and follow other interests like languages and Model UN.
After graduation, she worked at the Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit at Buffalo General Hospital. Once she completed the required experience to be a travel nurse, she began to work at different hospitals across the country in order to have more control over her schedule.
In February 2023, she began her first 13-week travel assignment at Mount Carmel East Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and enjoyed it enough to extend her time there. Her next assignment was at the Cardiothoracic and Trauma ICU at Wynn Hospital in Utica, New York.
Although moving around can make it difficult to connect with co-workers at some locations, Collins appreciates that travel allows her to work with different departments and help patients from a variety of demographics.
She hopes to eventually explore other U.S. regions with her assignments.
“It’s pretty exciting,” she says. “If I get bored at one place, then I can go somewhere else and everything is completely new. It definitely stretches my brain, forces me to think. Plus I love setting my own schedule. I could take a year off if I wanted to.”
1. Laptop: A source of information and entertainment
2. Outerwear: Because hospitals are always really cold
3. Binder: “When I get to a new place, I print out their policies. At every hospital there are different things we’re allowed to do, different meds we’re allowed to give.”
4. Notebook: “As a travel nurse we only get one 12-hour shift to learn how the whole facility works. I write down the expectations.”
5. Prayer coin: “I carry a nurse’s prayer coin that my dad gave me. It says: Lord, watch over me as I perform my duties and serve my community. Please grant me the courage, strength, and determination to face my responsibilities with a hero’s valor. Amen.” n
Photos: Chris Garbin from C. Garbin Studios
Alumna uses photography to show overlooked DC
By Gabrielle Barone
After retiring from a career in nursing, Leslie (Fiumara) Landerkin (N’68) learned photography through local classes at the Smithsonian and The Art League in Old Town Alexandria. Now she is using her passion for photography to help others see the often overlooked people and elements of the Washington, DC, area as well as the beauty of nature.
More than 50 years after graduation, Landerkin says she still has many “wonderful friends from Georgetown,” and also especially appreciates that the university prepared them for many varied fields.
She has photographed everywhere from gardens to museums to hot air balloons near Luxor, Egypt. To capture the best moments, Landerkin carries a small stool with her so she can sit a while to get to know a place, seeing things often passed by.
“It’s amazing what you see when you’re not in a hurry,” Landerkin says.
After taking a photo that showed the juxtaposition of an unhoused person sleeping under the U.S. Capitol, she decided to begin the “Unhoused” series, working to respectfully feature people in the DC area who are chronically unhoused.
“The project started as an interest in portrait photography and evolved into so much more,” Landerkin says.
Landerkin prefers black and white photography as it allows the viewer to focus on the subjects rather than a bright color. She has also chosen to concentrate on the area where she lives because there isn’t the rush and distraction of trying to quickly capture a new place during a visit.
Her work has caught the eye of local gallery owners. One picture of a protest march through Washington was included in Gallery Underground’s “American Soul” exhibit. Another series documents the now-closed reformatory in Lorton, Virginia. Her work was also featured in a January 2024 special exhibit in the Arts Club of Washington.
Landerkin has published one book of photography and has another self-printed, hand-sewn one in the works.
She also hopes to continue meeting local unhoused community members and telling their stories. “I love photographing people when they’re in the moment,” she adds. n
achieved recognition for this photo, entitled “A Hard Place to Sleep.” It is part of a series she calls “Unhoused.”
Leslie (Fiumara) Landerkin (N’68)
Reflections on Health with Kieran Kammerer, M.D. (M’86)
Pediatrician at Kennebec Pediatrics (MaineGeneral Health) Owner, Operator at Hallowell Woodworks, LLC
I knew about Georgetown’s great reputation through my oldest brother, Dennis (C’74). I also knew Thomas Rizzo, M.D. (M’85) and Peter Rizzo, M.D. (C’82, G’83, M’87) from my hometown of Bronxville, New York.
My two closest friends are from my class: Donald Lewis, M.D. (M’86) and Kenneth Meehan, M.D. (M’86, R’89). We still stay in very close contact and I follow their career successes.
I chose pediatrics because I knew I could make a big impact on the world through kids.
I was the recipient of a Uniformed Services Air Force scholarship and subsequently did my residency with them. I loved my time in the military and met a great group of people. How ever, I always knew I wanted to practice in a smaller town where I could get to know the community and develop close relationships with pediatric patients and their families.
Because my practice is located in the state capitol, I often get the opportunity to talk to legislators about issues impacting the children in Maine. Recently we worked with our local city counselors on getting flavored tobacco products out of my own city of Hallowell.
For the last 31 years, I’ve been with Kennebec Pediatrics located in Augusta, Maine.
Receiving the Maine Hospital Association’s 2023 Caregiver of the Year Award came as a big surprise for me. I’ve never expected any kind of accolades. Like many health care provider’s families, my family made many sacrifices during my career. It was very special to share the award with all of them. I was also honored to receive the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce’s Community Service Kenney Award earlier this year.
Over the years, I’ve cut back on office hours and pursued my woodworking business, Hallowell Woodworks. I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands and woodworking allows me to create and decompress. When my first daughter was born, I built her a cradle. I then merged my two passions and focused on creating heirloom, wooden baby rattles. I design the rattles to stimulate infant’s visual, auditory, and tactile senses.
Retirement is rapidly approaching and I can truly say I have worked in one of the best possible professions. As I quietly work in my shop, I know I will reflect fondly on a career made possible through my George town education.
— Nowshin Chowdhury
Photos:
Courtesy of Kieran
Kammerer / iStock
As part of Georgetown’s Special Master’s Program in Physiology (SMP), the first of its kind in the U.S., students get a second chance to prove their fitness for the rigors of a medical school education. And in true Georgetown fashion, the SMP curriculum is balanced with Jesuit values and a focus on community service. Students in the program are assigned to spend most Fridays during their academic year volunteering for a local organization. Among these opportunities is the chance to assist a blind dragon boat rowing team.
—Heather Wilpone-Welborn
Georgetown University
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