Ignite Magazine | Spring 2022 by NEOMED

A P U B L I CAT I O N O F N O RT H E A S T O H I O M E D I CA L U N I V E R S I T Y • V O L 2 3 .1 S P R I N G 2 02 2

BUILDING UPON FOUNDATIONS IN MEDICINE AND LEADERSHIP When sociologist James V. Downton first coined the term “transformational leadership” some 50 years ago, many wondered what it meant — and how it could be measured. The concept has since been further developed as an evidence-based method now incorporated by many businesses to bring about positive change. From strength-based methods of positive change to data-informed decisions, such leadership training is also needed in medical education and practice. For this issue of Ignite, we talked with nine leaders, all but one of them alumni and the other a clinical faculty member: Jennifer Baccon, M.D./Ph.D.; Jaclyn Boyle, Pharm.D.; Michael De Georgia, M.D.; Serpil Erzurum, M.D.; Donald Malone Jr., M.D.; Crystal Mackall, M.D.; Princess Ogbogu, M.D.; Frank Papay, M.D.; and Duane Taylor, M.D. They’re at different stages of their professional lives, but NEOMED, which also started nearly 50 years ago, shaped them. Questioning. Transparent. Curious. Humble. Challenging. Caring: These team builders are eager to listen and not afraid to fail first. Health care needs more leaders like them. And while the need is great, so is NEOMED’s capacity to fill it. We have many more among our alumni, faculty, partners, researchers and staff who are doing amazing things like the stories you’ll read inside. •

Developing the first cell therapy approved for the treatment of cancer in a child

•

Performing the first near-total face transplant surgery

•

Building a new division at a major health system

•

Collaborating with engineers to use artificial intelligence to improve physician care for patients

•

Encouraging differences of opinion, limitations, negatives and even disobedience

•

Being the first among the underrepresented

•

Integrating mental health care with primary care

•

Advocating with others to do what’s right, to change what’s wrong

Harnessing diversity, innovation and collaboration is what we do. Creating transformational leaders is why we do it. Improved health through education, discovery and service is how we measure it. This is NEOMED. Sincerely,

John T. Langell President 02 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

VOL 23.1 SPRING 2022 Northeast Ohio Medical University is a public medical university with a mission to harness diversity, innovation and collaboration to create transformative leaders and improve health through education, discovery and service. The University embraces diversity, equity and inclusion and fosters a working and learning environment that celebrates differences and prepares students for patient-centered, team- and population-based care. Ignite magazine (Spring 2022, Volume 23, No. 1) is published twice a year by the Office of Marketing and Communications, 4209 St. Rt. 44, P.O. Box 95, Rootstown, OH 44272-0095 President John T. Langell, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., M.B.A. NEOMED Board of Trustees Richard B. McQueen, Chair Phillip L. Trueblood, Vice Chair E. Douglas Beach, Ph.D. Sharlene Ramos Chesnes William H. Considine, M.H.S.A. Robert J. Klonk Darrell L. McNair, M.B.A. Ward J. “Tim” Timken, M.B.A. Susan Tave Zelman, Ph.D. Student Trustees Sanjay K.A. Jinka Joshua L. Tidd Trustee Emeritus Paul R. Bishop, J.D.

Editor: Elaine Guregian Contributing Editors: Roderick L. Ingram Sr., Jared F. Slanina, Jeanne M. Hoban Publication Design: Scott J. Rutan Illustrations: Cover: Elise Radzialowski; pages 4, 6, 8 and 10, Dave Szalay, professor, University of Akron Myers School of Art. Photography: Pages 18, 28: Chris Smanto; pages 22 and 23, Christopher Mayerl and Elaine Guregian; pages 26 and 27, Mike Cardew. As a health sciences university, we constantly seek ways to improve the health, economy and quality of life in Northeast Ohio. The Accent Opaque White Text paper used for this magazine has earned a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and a Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certification. Strict guidelines have been followed so that forests are renewed, natural resources are preserved and wildlife is protected. Ignite was printed by Printing Concepts in Stow, Ohio, using soy inks. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the editors. Copyright 2022 by Northeast Ohio Medical University, Rootstown, Ohio 44272.

About the cover: Elise Radzialowski is a graduate of the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron, a NEOMED partner school.

DEPARTMENTS 18 HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE 22 RESEARCH 24 GLOBAL LEADERS 26 TASTES LIKE HOME 28 WHALE WATCHING 30 CLASS NOTES 34 DONOR SPOTLIGHT Ignite’s Fall and Spring 2021 issues received seven awards in the Press Club of Cleveland’s statewide contest, including awards in three Best in Ohio categories: Trade Publications, Illustrations and Headline Writing. Articles by Elaine Guregian and Roderick L. Ingram Sr. won awards, as did the Fall 2021 cover, by Dave Szalay, and an illustration by Branden Vondrak. Ignite’s Fall 2021 cover was also recognized as a silver Addy award winner by the Akron Chapter of the American Advertising Foundation (AAF). It won in the category of Publication Design Cover in the Collateral Material Category for professional agencies, organizations and individuals.

For more Spring 2022 content, go to neomed.edu/extras

04 FEATURES

04 EXEMPLARS OF LEADERSHIP Finding Therapies for Children’s Cancer: Crystal Mackall Giving Someone a New Face: Frank Papay Teaming with Engineers in the ICU: Michael De Georgia Breaking Color Barriers: Duane Taylor Growing Through Lean Efficiencies: Serpil Erzurum Having Tough Conversations Earlier: Donald Malone Jr. Recognizing Pharmacists as Doctors: Jaclyn Boyle Thinking Locally, Acting Nationally: Princess Ogbogu Cultivating Resilience: Jennifer Baccon

18 A MOUTHFUL OF HUMMINGBIRDS On the 40th anniversary of NEOMED’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, winners from across the nation share their thoughts.

Current and past issues of Ignite are available at Issuu.com

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

04 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

FEATURE

What prepares a person to lead? Is it life circumstances, life events, or a combination that’s different for everyone? In the following profiles, nine NEOMED health care leaders at various stages of their careers tell their stories. “Like a drumbeat.” That’s how powerfully one physician felt her mother's drive for her to become a physician, receiving the education her mother had been denied. Then there’s the physician-scientist who eagerly earned multiple degrees from Ivy League schools and remembers with a smile that her family often suggested that she learn to relax. Whatever varied routes they took, the NEOMED graduates in this group (eight of the nine are alumni) were lifted and propelled by the University’s culture of creating transformational leaders. With that mentorship and encouragement deep in their bones, they chose to intensify and broaden their impact by learning to lead a team — often in unknown areas and exciting ways they could never have envisioned when they were starting out. These leaders have much more to say, and you can find it at neomed.edu/extras.

Illustration: Dave Szalay

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

FEATURE

FINDING THERAPIES FOR CHILDREN’S CANCER: CRYSTAL MACKALL BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

ediatric immunoncology — helping pediatric cancer patients, both as a clinician and researcher — has always been irresistible to Crystal Mackall, M.D. (’84), the founding director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy. After graduating from NEOMED, she was recruited to the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, where she immersed herself in research and advocating for it, becoming the chief of the Pediatric Oncology Branch. Being asked to step into a leadership role during her 27-year career at the NIH launched her on an additional trajectory — one that eventually led to Stanford University, where she has a big footprint in cancer research: associate director of Stanford Cancer Institute; leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program; director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy; and Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at the elite California institution.

Illustration: Dave Szalay

The search for answers to help patients propels Dr. Mackall’s work at the Mackall Lab at Stanford, and it drives her to serve on many national boards, advocating for research funding. Dr. Mackall’s specialty is to create immunotherapies for children's cancers (using the immune system to treat cancer). She focuses on developing new chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies to treat pediatric cancers.

RESEARCH UNLIKE ANY OTHER “It's a very futuristic thing when you hear about it,” Dr. Mackall said in a Zoom interview. “The first time I ever saw a patient treated with CAR T-cells was in 2010 — at the NIH. It was an adult who had a severe lymphoma and had complete eradication of his disease within one month that was sustained. And you know, CAR-T cells had been invented about 20 years prior but had not been optimized to the point of clinical activity. I said, okay, this is unlike anything I've ever seen before. We're going to pivot.

“I pretty much dropped everything my lab was doing at the time. And we became one of the first to show that the CD19 CAR could also be used in children. It ended up leading to an FDA approval — the first cell therapy approved for the treatment of cancer in a child. “Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed that cancer therapies have evolved a lot, and especially in the treatment of adult cancers,” she says, noting that progress has been notably slower in children’s cancer. “You know, we've got wonderful researchers in the field of children's cancer, but the research that worked in adult cancers and drove progress starting in the ’90s didn't work in children's cancer.” It could be argued that some of the reasons for the stall are market-driven, says the forthright physician. Children's cancers are a small market, so the biotech industry has not been as incentivized to develop new therapies. “But I’m really dogged,” she says. And focused. “I think that there's a lot of ways to get distracted in the world in which I live. There's a lot of other stuff — promotions and prestige, all of that. But at the end of the day, you know, it's all about creating better treatments for our patients and delivering them with the best care we can deliver. And I think that a patient-centric view was instilled in me very deeply at NEOMED. It was a very high-functioning, committed group of people with a lot of integrity — and the patient always came first.” The February 7, 2022, online issue of the journal Nature features the results of Dr. Mackall’s lab in developing an active therapy to treat a deadly pediatric brain tumor – the first time an active therapy has been used for these gliomas. Those results on GD2 CAR T-cell therapy for H3K27M-mutated diffuse midline gliomas were also presented at a plenary session of the American Association for Cancer Research in April. NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

04 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

FEATURE

When a whole surgical team locks in, there’s a “flow” between them – like the unspoken but palpable connection that Dr. Papay used to feel when he played drums in jazz groups. “When it happens, you cannot describe it, but you feel it,” he says. “It’s pretty awesome!”

ENHANCING THE IMPACT

GIVING SOMEONE A NEW FACE: FRANK PAPAY BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

ike many children raised during the Space Race, Frank Papay, M.D. (’84), grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut. He didn’t make the cut after he finished his M.S. degree in engineering at Case Western Reserve University, but he was still able to partially fulfill his dream as a biomedical engineer interning at Cleveland’s NASA Lewis Research Center. Dr. Papay quickly learned how top-notch senior engineers navigated toward successful designs: “You build redundant systems in case of failure, regardless of the chances.” The habit of asking “What if?” has guided Dr. Papay through a career as an otolaryngologist, plastic craniofacial surgeon, inventor and serial new ventures founder at the Cleveland Clinic, where he serves as chair of the Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Institute, chairman of the Plastic Surgery department and head of the Section of Craniofacial Surgery. Dr. Illustration: Dave Szalay

Papay was honored this year by the Cleveland Clinic as the Centennial Sones Innovation Awardee for lifetime innovation in the practice of medicine and surgery. “You always want to be prepared for trouble so you’re aware of it and not anxious in reacting to it if it ever happens,” he says. “With any sort of new innovation or new surgical procedure where there’s a lot of risk, you include risk factors in the design, mitigating them as you would for a rocket launch.” When Dr. Papay led the surgical team that conducted America’s first face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008 and the world’s youngest complete facial transplant in 2015, treating the patients was uppermost on his mind. Today, it’s gratifying to him that these face transplant patients became spokespersons for others who were victims of abuse and suicidal ideations.

A passion for helping patients beyond the operating room led Dr. Papay to branch out into inventing medical devices, such as a neuromodulation device for cluster headaches. A device for sleep apnea (soon to be on the market) is easier to wear than a CPAP setup, he says. An invention for surgical navigation uses augmented reality (AR); and what he calls fluorescent guided surgery, or “surgery by color,” should also be on the market soon. Advancements in AR allow surgeons like Dr. Papay to practice what he calls situational awareness by integrating into the surgeon’s vision the patient’s vitals, radiology scans, targeted tumor fluorescence and real-time registration. This visual integration creates a three-dimensional operative situational awareness of surgeon’s intra-operative surroundings, making surgery safer. “It’s how a fighter pilot lands,” says Dr. Papay, who believes that every physician should integrate new technologies such as machine learning into a habit of lifelong education. (In what he calls “reverse mentorship,” he often learns from his younger students on topics like these.) “If you make a product better and make it more accessible to many patients, the impact of your innovation makes you and your team’s legacy much greater,” he says. At the time of this interview, he and his team at the Cleveland Clinic were preparing to design a groundbreaking hand transplant that had been previously delayed by COVID-19. The potential for transformative leadership? Never better. NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

FEATURE

TEAMING WITH ENGINEERS IN THE ICU: MICHAEL DE GEORGIA BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”

resident Dwight D. Eisenhower said later that he had made that observation as “sort of a wisecrack,” but it speaks to a necessary component of leadership, says Michael De Georgia, M.D. (’89), director of the Neurocritical Center at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, where he holds the Maxeen Stone and John A. Flower Endowed Chair in Neurology. To behave as President Eisenhower suggested requires a level of confidence that can be a struggle for many people, particularly early in their careers, the neurologist said in a Zoom interview. Similarly, admitting that you don’t know everything also requires confidence, says Dr. De Georgia, and it's helpful when forming collaborative partnerships. For example, he doesn’t try to prove his engineering expertise when he’s in the company of Case Western Reserve University Illustration: Dave Szalay

engineers. And that situation comes up frequently. Here’s why. When Dr. De Georgia manages a patient in the intensive care unit (ICU), he sees the same collection of tubes hanging above the bed and hears the same beeping monitors that everyone else does, but he notices something else: The monitor above the patient’s bed is collecting data, but it’s not connected to the ventilator next to the patient, or to the infusion pumps, or to the intracranial pressure monitor. What’s more frustrating, says Dr. De Georgia, is that physicians like him can’t analyze the data because it isn’t stored. It flits across the screen and then drifts off into space. Making sense of rapidly evolving complexity in the ICU requires data integration and a wide array of analytical tools. Working closely with Case engineers, Dr. De Georgia developed the Integrated Medical Environment (tIME), a system to help translate raw data into actionable information. As he puts it, “The end game is artificial intelligence and deep learning, which are buzzwords but really cool. And the massive effort is worth it. If

the data from these monitors could be collected and combined, cleansed (to distill it to the most usable information), stored and made available for analysis, it could transform how physicians care for their patients. It's just that to get there, a lot of engineering is involved." Dr. De Georgia always admired NEOMED professor and cardiologist Andre Ognibene, M.D., who used to wonder aloud when he took students on rounds, “Why is that happening?” The neurologist, neurointensivist and stroke doctor channeled that curiosity. Because he saw the benefits of better data integration and analysis, he initiated long-term projects such as the Integrated Medical Environment for Decision Support national consortium, which draws on the skills of engineers, scientists and clinicians alike. And he recently established the Center for Connected Health Innovation at Case Western Reserve University to further catalyze research and harness this technology to improve patient outcomes. His engineering colleagues are brilliant people who often bring a completely different perspective to the task at hand, says Dr. De Georgia. As a result, they approach problems differently, which can sometimes be frustrating but ultimately is valuable. He has found that it is effective to lead with a humility born of confidence.

A SOLID MEDICAL EDUCATION Dr. De Georgia’s secure foundation began at NEOMED, where he says, “I was very fortunate to have an incredibly solid medical education and outstanding mentors,” such as neuroscience professor Ted Voneida, Ph.D., and internal medicine professor Dr. Ognibene. Dr. De Georgia initially completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan with the plan of becoming a cardiologist. At the time, neurocritical care was just in its infancy, but the idea of saving the brain, not just the heart, appealed to his sense of NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

FEATURE

meaning and wonder. The story of how he pursued it includes love and a leap of faith. Dating a German girl (who later became his wife) led him to pursue neurocritical care and stroke research at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, one of the premier, early hubs of the field, instead of staying in Michigan for a cardiology fellowship. Today, Dr. De Georgia encourages students and residents to follow their hearts, as he did. “Trust your gut. Do what you are

passionate about,” he says. “And choose your mentors carefully, as they often will play an important role in shaping who you are and who you become.” In conversation, it’s quickly apparent that human emotions rank right up there with science for this thoughtful physician. For example, when meeting with the families of people with serious neurological injuries, he says, “I think that the residents need to understand that this is often the most traumatic experience this family has

ever experienced in their lives. It’s an existential crisis. It's the most horrific thing they could ever imagine. “I try to help the residents understand the humanity of the situation. Because they’re young, residents may not appreciate that this is somebody's wife or husband or father. These are actual people who, prior to today, were living normal lives. You don't think about those things until you're older and have aging parents and kids of your own.”

was a scientist overseeing a microbiology immunology department in Cleveland; his mother, a school principal who had been a Fulbright scholar at La Sorbonne in France. Spending his senior year of high school as a page on Capitol Hill exposed the Shaker Heights, Ohio native to the ways of government — a universe of its own.

of social justice issues. Dr. Taylor had earlier led and supported the development of seminars and conferences to look at health equity, health disparities, health literacy and other social determinants of health. During his presidency, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion task force became a committee with a seat on the Board of Directors. “Now, of course, I had to have the support of leaders and sometimes it’s the right place at the right time — and the right person. But after many years of trying to do this, I said, if you give us the template, I will make sure these things happen,” he said in a Zoom interview from Bethesda, Maryland, where he is the medical director of Le Visage ENT & Facial Plastic Surgery. “If you open your mouth, you have got to be ready to walk the walk and to make it happen,” Dr. Taylor said with a smile. During his year as president, the Academy board obtained funding to produce a series of 10 educational videos on implicit bias in areas including not only race but also religion, ethnicity and gender.

THE NEED TO ADVOCATE

BREAKING COLOR BARRIERS: DUANE TAYLOR BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Persistent. In conversation, Duane Taylor, M.D. (’85), doesn’t use that word to describe himself, but it suits a man who has spent his whole 37-year career in medicine working to promote diversity in medicine. To this otolaryngologist, the word diversity holds many meanings. He started cultivating a broad worldview by traveling with his parents at an early age. His father 12 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

Early on, Dr. Taylor felt the need to advocate for better representation of those who lacked a voice. A first taste of involvement at the national level came when Dr. Taylor represented the Washington, D.C., area of the Young Physicians Section of the American Medical Association. He was part of the group of physicians who started what is now known as the Minority Physicians Section of the AMA. In 2019, Dr. Taylor broke a barrier by becoming the first Black president of the American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery — a year of leadership defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and the heightened awareness

PROPELLING THE NEXT GENERATION Today, Dr. Taylor serves as an ex-officio member of the Academy’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, which

has two endowments he helped to fund and develop. The Harry Barnes Endowment Travel Grant (named for the first African American physician to be board-certified in otolaryngology) funds underrepresented minority students of African descent from Canada, the Caribbean and the U.S. to attend the AAO’s annual conference. The Diversity Endowment URM Away Rotation Grant helps to pay for away otolaryngology rotations by underrepresented minorities during their senior year of medical school. From the beginning, Dr. Taylor has been involved with the National Medical Association — the largest organization of African American physicians in the county. That followed naturally from his days at NEOMED, when he was the only Black student in his class and participated in NEOMED’s chapter of the Student National Medical Association, an organization for underrepresented minority medical students. As NEOMED has become much more diverse — 30% of its 2021 College of Medicine class is underrepresented minority students — Dr. Taylor serves on its President’s Diversity and Equity Advisory Council to ensure that the progress is sustained. He also stresses the importance of opening doors in his specialty of otolaryngology, “which isn’t very diverse,” says Dr. Taylor, who often collaborates with the Academy’s Women in Medicine section. One of the five most competitive specialties, otolaryngology has the fewest African American students entering into residencies, he notes. “Is leadership an opportunity or an obligation?” he asks, rhetorically. “These are the things I considered each time a door opened for me.”

GROWING THROUGH LEAN EFFICIENCIES: SERPIL ERZURUM BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

This spring, just back from the opening of the Cleveland Clinic’s new hospital in London, Serpil Erzurum, M.D. (’83), confirmed that research will be part of the mix there — an expansion of the mission that the Clinic has always pursued. In the past year, this veteran of 28 years at the Clinic saw her own responsibilities grow, too. Beginning in 2021, Dr. Erzurum’s responsibility for the Clinic’s entire research enterprise was expanded to also encompass the institution’s work in education and innovation (the arm that takes research discoveries and moves them into practice). One new research area launched during this time was the Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research in Human Health.

BIG GOALS In a Zoom call, the pulmonologist and researcher recalled that when she took the job overseeing research in 2016, she set a goal of doubling the Clinic’s research

spend, then just over $200 million. “I proposed that we reach $500 million spent each year. We are at about $350 million this year and I believe in the next few years we'll achieve our goal, which is overall to support more research and innovation,” she says. The key? Philanthropy and advocating for government funding are both important, she notes. But there’s more: “We could be more efficient. We recalculated spaces that were needed to do research. And then we recruited researchers into the spaces, which meant that we were efficiently growing research. We also reorganized departments and the administrative teams for efficiencies, particularly for grant submissions. If a researcher submits 10 grants and only one is funded, that's a waste of time. We knew we could improve infrastructure for grants writing and submissions, so that the chances of funding improve. That would save researchers time they could use for thinking of new ideas and communicating their findings to the NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

FEATURE

world through publications,” she says. Dr. Erzurum also set in place expanded information technology infrastructure to support the investigators. Pointing to the tremendous growth in big data science, she notes that huge volumes of data must be managed, and the use of data analytics needs to be optimized. She led the initiative to hire more data scientists and supported the growth of computational services — a step that has increased researchers’ capacity for computation and analysis, thus increasing their potential for productivity and high impact.

SUPPORTING THE TEAM Some of her leadership success may have come because she likes being on teams, says Dr. Erzurum. “I really welcome differences of opinion, and I actively look for them. I question individuals, because I want them to question me. When we're having meetings, I'll ask, ‘What are the limitations and possibilities in this approach? I enjoy hearing about the positives, but especially the negatives, because it means the process is working and somebody said something that ultimately put us on a better path.” A dog lover, she was

intrigued by how seeing-eye dogs are trained. The final test is to see if the dog does not just follow commands but is actively and intentionally disobedient. If there is danger, the animal doesn’t just stop. It forcefully jerks you backward, she relates. That’s not so different from leadership: “It’s this idea that we’re all in it together. I’d better listen, because I know you mean well and you’re speaking up because it’s the right thing to do.” Highly organized, Dr. Erzurum sets milestones to help her teams stay on track. But there’s more: “Transparency, being honest and forthright with people on the team. The team works best when they have all the knowledge at their disposal so they can understand why decisions are being made,” she says. Growing up, there was always laughter in her household, along with “a steady drumbeat” of expectation to excel in school. (Several of her four siblings are health care professionals. Her sister, Sergul Erzurum, M.D., graduated from NEOMED in 1988, and their late brother Victor graduated in 1995.) Today, she says, “Having a sense of humor is important in life, for the resilience to get

through things. Everything is less tense and more hopeful with humor.”

A CLINICIAN FIRST Dr. Erzurum thinks of herself first as a clinician, with research serving as a tool to solve problems of her patients. Much of her work is with asthma, the most common chronic condition in children and a major cause of emergency room visits. She has seen tremendous progress in the last two or three decades, from improved care, she says — which is directly from research. “Today, physicians understand the underlying causes and we have biologic therapies that can be given to severe patients to block the cause of their asthma. We even have hope for drugs that might cause remission or a cure for asthma. Back in the 1980s, that's not something I could have even dreamed of in my lifetime. It’s gratifying to have contributed even in a small way through participation in network studies across the country, through my research work with patients and through biotech-funded studies. It’s still difficult and challenging, but now I tell patients, thanks to research, we have other things we can offer you.”

HAVING TOUGH CONVERSATIONS EARLIER: DONALD MALONE JR. BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Talking with Donald Malone Jr., M.D. (’85), one could easily forget that he leads all of the Cleveland Clinic’s hospitals across the state of Ohio. He speaks as if he had cleared his calendar and had all the time you could want to chat. Energetic and engaged, he’s also relaxed enough to make you feel he’s fully in the moment, intently listening — which makes sense, given his training in psychiatry. 14 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

In recent years, Dr. Malone has transitioned from work as a clinical psychiatrist, helping patients who may be in desperate need, to managing labor negotiations and brokering conversations and collaborations with individuals and institutions. His natural inclinations have helped: “I tend to be calm as the situation gets more tense,” said Dr. Malone in an interview. His training ground in management

came at Lutheran Hospital in Cleveland, a medical-surgical hospital with two areas of expertise: orthopaedics and behavioral health. In 2010, Dr. Malone became chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Psychiatry and Psychology, which has the largest inpatient footprint of any such department in the region. The leadership experience prepared him for the next step: becoming president of Cleveland Clinic Ohio Hospitals and Family Health Centers. At that level, he says, “You can’t look at all the details. You’re entirely dependent on your colleagues and all the other presidents of the institutions. It’s imperative that you have leaders that function highly. You need to assure good leadership and set direction.” Even though he knew many of his colleagues already, he went on a listening

tour to the hospitals across the state when he started the new job. “I think it’s very important to listen to the folks that you’ll be working with — to understand their motivation and what makes them tick,” he says. He has found 360-degree evaluations (conducted by colleagues) to be valuable, too. The nation desperately needs clinicians of all kinds to be leaders, Dr. Malone told the audience when he was the speaker for VITALS (NEOMED’s thought leadership series) in April. Although he describes his own path to leadership as accidental, he encourages those starting their careers to pursue that road purposefully. What would he tell those who aspire to his level of leadership? • Give other people credit for the work they do. People will go to the

mat for you if they know you are behind them. • Firing someone, demoting someone, telling somebody they didn’t get the position they wanted — those are hard things to do. But the faster you have those difficult conversations, the better. • If you can’t do anything about a given request, be honest about it. Honesty and transparency go a very long way. • There’s no substitute for experience. Until you actually lead in the position and find out what are your strengths and your skill sets, you just don’t know. Sometimes people get impatient, and I tell them there’s grunt work involved! It took me 31 years to get to this position.

RECOGNIZING PHARMACISTS AS DOCTORS: JACLYN BOYLE BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

For years, legal restrictions made it nearly impossible for pharmacists in the U.S. to be reimbursed without mounds of paperwork when they partnered with physicians. Yes, they could team up to manage patient medications and care plans — making sure that patients weren’t having side effects and that they were on affordable medications. “But there was no direct billing mechanism so they could be reimbursed for their time and expertise as health care providers in these situations,” says Jaclyn Boyle, Pharm.D. (’12), M.B.A.

That door was closed. A visit to the state capital in Columbus on Legislative Day opened Dr. Boyle’s eyes to the work of advocacy when she was a student in the College of Pharmacy. When she started practicing, she began in earnest to advocate for legislation surrounding provider status in the state of Ohio. Dr. Boyle became president of the Ohio Society of Healthcare Pharmacists (OSHP) in 2016, at a time when the organization was teaming up with the OCCP and Ohio Pharmacist Association to push for provider status in the state. “Our legislators wanted to know specifically how the law would impact patients in Ohio. We collected proof points from pharmacists across the state to show that provider status would achieve the Triple NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

FEATURE

Aim,” says Dr. Boyle: improving the patient care experience, improving the health of populations and reducing the per capita cost of health care. In May 2018, Dr. Boyle was one of half a dozen pharmacists and two physicians who testified in support of SB265

in front of the Ohio Senate Insurance and Financial Institutions Committee. In January 2019, Ohio Gov. John Kasich approved SB265, formally recognizing pharmacists as providers in Ohio — and importantly, allowing them to be reimbursed as such.

Today, pharmacy advocates are working to pass a provider status bill at the federal level. Dr. Boyle leads students in letter-writing campaigns and embeds advocacy into the curriculum, student organizations — wherever she can. As she says, “I try to get them as involved as I can.”

transition everything,” the outgoing leader said cheerfully, in an interview. But growing clinical and research programs at UH within the fields of allergy/immunology and pediatric rheumatology has been “really, really fun and engaging,” says Dr. Ogbogu, because it has brought her in contact with so many different stakeholders. “Part of being a transformational leader is identifying who the stakeholders are,” she noted. “That takes some time and some relationship building, right? Especially when you're coming in from the outside trying to figure out what needs to be done.” She began with a division of one. The team will soon become a division of six, serving the academic center in three ways: providing clinical care, educating medical students, residents and fellows; providing community engagement and education; and building the research program. Regarding the research aspect, Dr. Ogbogu adds, “We want to be able to offer innovative therapeutic options to patients — options that they may not be able to get otherwise.” Much of her own clinical research focuses on clinical

trials with immune therapeutics (biologics) for allergic and immunologic disorders.

THINKING LOCALLY, ACTING NATIONALLY: PRINCESS OGBOGU BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

When Princess Ogbogu, M.D. (’00), was recruited to University Hospitals (UH) in Cleveland, her mission was clear: to build. UH had never before had a division of pediatric allergy, immunology and rheumatology, and Dr. Ogbogu was appointed as its inaugural chief. The timing was tricky. Dr. Ogbogu started in August 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown — “a wild time to 16 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

MAKING A NATIONAL IMPACT After graduating from NEOMED and completing an allergy/immunology training fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Ogbogu served as the division chief of Allergy/Immunology and co-training program director of the Allergy Immunology Fellowship Program at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Today, she contributes to national discussions on policies and advocates for her specialty. Dr. Ogbogu sits on the Allergy/Immunology Review Committee for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which centers on ensuring adequate training standards. And she’s serving a six-year term on the American Board of Allergy and Immunology (ABAI), which she will chair next year. “It's important to have a seat at the table where decisions are being made,” she says. “When you're taking care of a patient, you may be able to help one person. If you're doing research, you may be able to help several people. If you're working on national committees, you may be able to help thousands or millions of people.”

of learning how to interact with all members of the team, says Dr. Baccon. “Something that was a real growth experience for me was assignments where we were challenged to talk to everybody, from the person who sits at the front desk or as a greeter for the organization to the CEO and board members,” she says. “We need to appreciate our peers and our colleagues for who they are and the experiences that they bring to the table, because you need a little bit of everybody to make the whole thing work.” She adds, “You also need to find the right balance between being visionary and forward thinking, but also being focused on the ground level. It was a great compliment when a senior leader said to me that I know when to dream big and I know when I need to roll up my sleeves and get down in the details. And you have to know the right time to switch between those two things.” Dr. Baccon intentionally carves out time to do long-term visioning and planning. “If you only fight the daily fires, you won’t make great progress,” she notes.

CULTIVATING RESILIENCE: JENNIFER BACCON BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

When life gets stressful, Jennifer Baccon, M.D., Ph.D., M.H.C.M., is used to bouncing back. That innate strength carried her through three Ivy League institutions to cap off an M.D./Ph.D. program with a Master of Health Care Management degree — earned at Harvard while leading as the chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Akron Children’s Hospital and as chair of Pathology at NEOMED. Why add that final degree in management? She felt well respected in her clinical role, Dr. Baccon said in an interview — but she wakes up in the morning thinking about finance, strategy and business operations. She wanted to develop fluency so that she could sit down with CFOs or other administrators and speak their language.

A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYBODY Much of the health care management training at Harvard builds on the concept

RESILIENT BY NATURE — AND NURTURE Anxiety, depression, burnout — all of these are potential pitfalls for professionals in health care, especially for trainees such as residents, says Dr. Baccon. To support and lead those coming into the work force, she advises encouraging them to identify what makes themselves tick and to commit to it — realizing that they don’t have to be perfect.

No one is immune to low points, but when she hits them, “I bounce up pretty quickly,” says Dr. Baccon. She also deliberately follows practices to lower stress, like not using her phone to do work and unplugging for time with her family in the evenings. Dr. Baccon’s fortitude was put to the test when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. During the eight months when she was working long days, seven days a week, she realized, “You need to draw on any ounce of optimism you have inside and share that with your team, because you’re asking people to work 24/7. You need to be a rock.”

PREPARED FOR A CRISIS Dr. Baccon had trained for a career in pathology with all those degrees in hopes that if a crisis ever hit, she'd be equipped to help. When COVID closed down everyday life, she felt confident of her professional expertise, from her basic science laboratory experience in virology to her accumulated knowledge from an M.D./Ph.D. program in cell and molecular biology. Yet it was disheartening to see the public distrust of science whittle away at public trust of researchers like her, she says. An optimist by nature, it did cause some disillusionment. Another challenge of being a leader through the pandemic? “Usually, you want a message to have some longevity to it. But with the pandemic, we were growing and learning, and the virus was developing, so we needed to give a different message to the public from week to week.” That wasn’t easy. In spring 2022, things are still uncertain, but Dr. Baccon knows how to sit more comfortably with a lack of clarity, knowing she has plenty of resilience in reserve.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE

A MOUTHFUL OF HUMMINGBIRDS BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

he patients of William Carlos Williams, M.D. (18831963) may not have known that he had another profession besides the family practice he sustained for 40 years in Rutherford, New Jersey. But it seems that Williams didn’t view writing poetry and healing people as an either/ or proposition. And that’s something that the top winners of NEOMED’s 40th annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition found tremendously validating. “In med school we think there can be only one path and if you have any other interest, it can detract. This competition reminds me that there are programs like NEOMED that incorporate things like poetry and that it’s ok to have a creative outlet,” said first-place winner Thomas Nguyen at this year’s award ceremony, held in person at NEOMED for the first time since 2019. In his winning poem, “Here, the light is always fading,” Nguyen memorialized his grandmother’s last days, writing, “I remember your voice, a mouthful of hummingbirds, their beaks pointed skyward.” Being brought to campus for the annual poetry event gave three top winners a chance to spend time with likeminded students and faculty. Seeing a home for topics like narrative writing in the NEOMED curriculum, “I’m in awe of all the programming,” said third-place winner Anneka Johnston, a third-year student at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.

18 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

MORE A NECESSITY THAN A HOBBY “All three of us write poetry to make sense of the wild and crazy things we experience as medical students. To me, poetry is more a necessity than a hobby,” said second-place winner Amelia Khoo, who — like Nguyen — is a third-year medical student at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. “Coming from a poetry mindset makes me more attentive to details that make me a better physician, too.”

GRAPHIC MEDICINE Keynote speaker M.K. Czerwiec, a pioneer in the field of graphic medicine, told the students in the audience that she discovered while serving as a nurse in an HIV/AIDS unit in Chicago in the 1980s that making comics could help her process her feelings. When she was overwhelmed by the seriousness of the issues she helped patients cope with — and later, when she faced her mother’s cancer — she discovered solace in the pages of a notebook. Filling each piece of paper with simple drawings and captions gave her a place to unload each day’s heavy emotions — and make room for more. Following are the three prize-winning poems from the 2022 competition. As always, the winning poems will be published in the Journal of Medical Humanities. Listen to the winners read their poems and read co-founder Martin Kohn, Ph.D.’s reminiscence about how the contest began, both at neomed.edu/extras.

PLACE WINNER:

Thomas Nguyen is a third-year medical student at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. He studied neuroscience and poetry during his undergraduate years at University of Texas-Austin and graduated with an M.S. in narrative medicine from Columbia University. He is fascinated with the connection between healing and writing and hopes to combine the two as a physician-writer. His first collection of poetry, Permutations of a Self, won the 2019 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in April 2020 by Texas A&M University Press. Other poems of his have been featured in Frontier Poetry, Nashville Review,Tinderbox Poetry, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other journals.

Here, the light is always fading & the dead speak to us in flutters. In the lull of our routines: mound of unwashed pots, damp laundry line between magnolias. When we crowded around my grandmother lying in the hospital bed, her face was chiseled alabaster, windless lake. By that time, her lungs had turned to mycelium, her liver cracked asphalt. Nodules bloomed like violet mouths. I knew enough at twelve to know this story would end with cathedrals of smoke, light through a veil. The nurse asked for her name: bà ngoại, we said. Bà ngoại, she’d say, gently, while combing my grandmother’s hair, clipping her nails. I watched my grandmother, who knew no English & writhed underneath hospital sheets whenever doctors & nurses entered, fall into repose. Tenseless, like the sun nestling within a distant field. Brief sanctum from tangled wires & the incessant whir of machines. There’s not much I remember after that. Or maybe, there’s not much left. Cartographer of my grief drawing whirlpools in the map I’ll later use to retrace this time. I know now that memory takes more than it gives. But I remember the noise foaming at the edges of your mouth like a wash. & I remember your voice, a mouthful of hummingbirds, their beaks pointed skyward.

Nguyen’s poem is a reflection on the final days of his grandmother’s life; how memory and grief change over time.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE

PLACE WINNER: bright welled up with tears the first time I saw it (a liver) all smooth jewel in sterile brightness surprised I think by its proximity by how peaceful she looked: grip slackened eyes shut could have been sleeping although by now I know I must have been as mute silent prayer frozen on my lips whisked off into reliably dreamless sleep someone else’s bread and butter

Amelia Khoo is a third-year medical student in the EnMed program at Texas A&M College of Medicine. She was born and raised in Alameda, California, where she cultivated a love for creative writing, and attended Brown University for undergraduate studies. There, she received her B.S. in biomedical engineering, helped edit and contribute to literary magazines, and took as many poetry classes as possible! She now lives in Houston, Texas and is pursuing her M.D. and Master’s in Engineering. Outside of poetry, Amelia enjoys singing and ultimate frisbee! Just prior to the start of medical school, Khoo was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and found herself a patient as she underwent treatment. Her poem is a reflection on the role reversal she experienced when beginning rotations in the hospital.

20 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

these days I look into the patient’s mirror and a starched-coat reflection stares right back wide-eyed and unfamiliar and green mouth full of words I cannot understand unless through my own greasy-haired reflection adorned in hospital gown consider: the only time the inside of a body is not pitch black is when it is in need of repair or being repaired and I have never known my insides to be so bright. run my fingers across the hypertrophic spots of my scar like beads on a rosary (I think a medical student closed me up but somehow I don’t mind as much anymore)

PLACE WINNER:

CNA Clinicals Day #3 It was mud. All mud. His language lost in pain and loose teeth, and it may have been important, may have been a plea for a priest, a cigar, or forgiveness for stealing his sister’s lunchbox, his brother’s wife, and do you think we fill in other people’s cracks to heal our own? Some days, I drag soap over broken bodies to convince myself that I am clean. My instructor never turns their groans into stories.

Anneka Johnston grew up in West Michigan and attended Kenyon College, majoring in English with a special certification in creative writing, and minoring in chemistry. Continuing her lifelong commitment to avoid sunny weather, Johnston moved to Chicago following graduation, and worked in a Suboxone clinic at the height of Chicago’s opioid epidemic. She began searching for the common ground between medicine and the humanities, and became passionate about giving voice to patient experiences through narrative art. She is currently a third-year student at Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine and is planning to pursue a career in psychiatry. Johnston’s poem is an exploration of how caretakers struggle to make meaning out of death.

She pokes a straw through his chapped lips to shut him up, and has me hold his wrist to feel how blood leaves the extremities when the heart begins to scream, feel how his pulse shakes like a wet, caged bird. He jolts. He’ll squirm less when he’s dead my instructor jokes, and laughs when my hands jump to cover his ears betraying my need to protect this patient from her sharp truth, her rough decree that to the world, he is already unhearing unseeing, unformed, already dispersed beyond our reach, beyond revision the way fire burns wood into ash the way that ash and water will forever be mud.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH

BETTER SWALLOWING FOR BABIES BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Photo left: Kendall Steer, a University of Akron undergraduate pursuing a career in speech pathology, left, with postdoctoral research fellow Christopher Mayerl, right Photo top right: Researchers can observe the infant pig’s sucking movements on a computer monitor. Photo bottom right: Max Johnson, research assistant, left, and postdoctoral research fellow Khaled Adjerid, right

22 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

-ray on! Ready for pig! Belly band on! The scientists assembled in the lab call out their carefully orchestrated protocol and then intently observe an infant pig doing its mightiest to suck up some good gulps of milk. Difficulty with swallowing often goes along with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It also affects premature babies. A group of NEOMED scientists is studying the mechanics of swallowing and looking for ways to improve the process. Like scientists in NEOMED’s other five Research Focus Areas, those in Musculoskeletal Research often collaborate with scientists outside the region. The photos shown here capture a day when a group of researchers in the lab of Rebecca German, Ph.D., professor of anatomy and neurobiology and co-director of musculoskeletal biomechanics, was joined by Nicole Danos, Ph.D., a scientist visiting from San Diego, to advance their study of designing a bottle and nipple to emulate breastfeeding for babies.

My identity as a mother, a scientist and a teacher all come together today,” said Dr. Danos on the day of her visit. “As a woman in science, it’s very important to have role models like Dr. German and to see ourselves as subjects of scientific study, including as nursing mothers.”

Photo left: Nichole Danos, a researcher from the University of San Diego, has collaborated on the project, including developing nipple prototypes.

Back in 2018, Dr. Danos started visiting NEOMED from the University of San Diego, a private school in California, to work with Dr. German’s team — which includes Christopher Mayerl, Ph.D., as a key member, says Dr. German. Not long ago, Dr. Mayerl was the lead author of a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society about how the muscles involved in feeding in infant mammals change through infancy. “Breastfeeding isn’t better just because of the nutrition it provides,” explains Dr. Mayerl. Nursing, including the suction process, is also important because it helps babies develop muscles in the mouth and teaches them to coordinate swallowing with breathing.

DEVELOPING A PROTOTYPE At Dr. Danos’ lab in San Diego, she developed ideas and sketches for an artificial nipple that would allow a pig to nurse more efficiently. Further developing his colleague’s ideas with what he learned about suction, Dr. Mayerl began building casts for a variety of slightly different nipples. Eventually, he narrowed

down the choices to the prototype he developed that is now being used in the lab. “Pre-term babies often aspirate (choke) when they are swallowing,” Dr. Mayerl explains. So do adults with conditions including neurodegeneration, in which aspiration often leads to pneumonia and sometimes death.

VALUING WOMEN IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH “My identity as a mother, a scientist and a teacher all come together today,” said Dr. Danos on the day of her visit. “As a woman in science, it’s very important to have role models like Dr. German and to see ourselves as subjects of scientific study, including as nursing mothers.” Potentially, the nipple developed by Drs. Mayerl and Danos could be commercialized for humans. To get to that point, the research team has access to NEOMED’s legal expertise and help with intellectual property law, such as patents and copyrights. Tech transfer is part of the infrastructure provided by the University. For now, this team is advancing understanding of a deceptively simple activity that is key to life. NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

GLOBAL LEADERS

A pre-digital (handmade) panorama of the valley in Western Cuba where the author’s mother grew up

OUR CULTURES, OUR COMMUNITY: CUBA BY SEBASTIÁN R. DÍAZ

A display of international flags on campus proudly represents the diverse ancestries of NEOMED students. When invited to reflect on how the display made them feel, members of the NEOMED community responded with many stories that have been published in The Pulse, the University’s daily enewsletter. Here, we share a reflection by Sebastián R. Díaz, Ph.D., J.D., associate dean for Quality Initiatives in the College of Medicine.

y old man knew from admiralty law principles that once he set foot on an American airliner, he was officially on U.S. soil. My mother tells me that he was so anxious to set foot on the plane that he tripped over himself as he proceeded back to our seats. We had waited three days at the city of Varadero’s airport, with limited access to bathroom facilities, to be allowed to board one of President Johnson’s Freedom Flights out of Cuba. Before takeoff, after we were all finally seated in the airliner, the stewardesses (as they were called then) came through wearing masks and unapologetically sprayed cans of Lysol throughout the cabin. We all stunk to high heaven. Less than an hour after takeoff, we entered an entirely different world as ref-

24 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

ugees to the United States. CIA personnel interviewed my father, and then Catholic Relief Services gave us airline tickets to be relocated to El Paso, Texas, where a church benevolently gave my parents jobs as janitors and provided us a place to live (we later relocated to New Jersey and then Florida). My father, Augusto, had arrived from his native fatherland (Patria) to a new motherland. He was 53 years old, with a wife who didn’t speak a word of English, three boys under the age of five, and roughly $40 in his pocket. To be able to leave Cuba, the deal was this: You had to turn over all your assets (real estate, businesses, even household items catalogued by ñángaro military personnel) in exchange for getting to walk away from an autocracy. My mother, Ana, was against the idea, as she wanted to stay in Cuba

and ride out the revolutionary storm. My father unapologetically put his foot down and said, “We’re getting out of here.” I humbly admit my life has been blessed immeasurably by this moment of macho hardheadedness. On the same date, March 10, 26 years later, I was living in Athens, Ohio. My roommate Dan, an aspiring grunge-rock musician, woke me up at 2 a.m. to tell me my brother Claudio was on the phone crying (this was pre-cell phones). Between sobs, Claudio told me that our father had just passed away in Orlando, Florida. On the same date, yet again, 46 years after arriving here, we buried my mother next to him there in Orlando, in the Cuban community where our parents had made their American home. There are many stories sandwiched in between those subsequent occurrences of March 10. And strangely, in a land far away called Northeast Ohio, I am reminded of those memories every time I swipe my card to enter the R building, and glance upwards to my left. La banderita Cubana 🇺 (the Cuban flag) hangs there

🇨

Top: The author’s daughters in Little Havana (Miami), near the José Martí memorial Middle: Sebastian (center) with his parents and brothers after moving to New Jersey in the late ’60s Bottom: A newspaper article told the Diaz family’s refugee story. Between 1965 and 1973, 300,000 Cuban refugees came to the U.S. via Freedom Flights like theirs.

silently, thanks in large part to a brilliant idea suggested by a College of Pharmacy student, Ikenna Ogwuegbu, and implemented by my colleague Sandra Emerick, Ed.D. Ikenna Ogwuegbu’s idea was to affirm the diversity of nationalities represented at NEOMED, and so Dr. Emerick surveyed our students to determine which flags to purchase and display. Just about every day, this flag display triggers for me yet another memory among all the March 10ths. A few years before my old man passed away, I was commenting to him how hard it must have been to leave behind a lifetime of memories, a slew of family members, and his own fatherland. Augusto, who had a penchant for predicting the future (he predicted years before it happened that Fidel Castro would align with the Communists, and that La Revolución would endure), jabbed a finger at me while looking me straight in the eye and responded calmly, “Hijo, someday you might have to take your family and leave the U.S. for the same reason we left Cuba.” Folks, this experiment in democracy is not something to take for granted. One of the ways to avoid that is to affirm the stories — some inspirational, some disheartening — represented among all the flags, including the Stars and Stripes, displayed at NEOMED. I encourage you all to listen carefully to the stories of our students, regardless of from where they come, as their collective experiences comprise NEOMED’s greatest asset.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

TASTES LIKE HOME

EMBRACING THE FLAVORS OF VIETNAM BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

aren Pham didn’t grow up as a foodie: she grew into it. As a child in Philadelphia, raised mostly by her grandmother while her parents (Vietnamese immigrants) were working long hours, meals were not particularly nutritious. They consisted of what could be purchased with food stamps at a nearby store: canned spaghetti, microwaveable meals. “As I got older, I felt the toll that the processed foods were having on my body. I learned how to wield a knife and it empowered me to take charge of my health through my diet,” says Pham, now a second-year student in the College of Medicine. During a two-year gap before starting at NEOMED, Pham worked for the Vetri Community Partnership, a nonprofit started by a successful Philadelphia restaurateur, Marc Vetri. In one program, Pham taught fifth and sixth graders the very lessons that helped her escape the food desert she was living in: specifics like how to hold a knife, how spices work, and how to make nutritious meals out of the canned or frozen vegetables available within convenience stores. “People will not eat better if they do not know how. As a doctor you can’t just say, ‘Go home and drink your milk and eat your vegetables.’ It may feel impossible to eat vegetables if you don’t have access to them or are unfamiliar with how to make them taste delicious,” says Pham. Also through the Vetri Community Partnership, Pham taught a culinary medicine course to pupils ranging from fourth-year 26 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

medical students at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine to the registered nurses and medical residents of Jefferson Hospital. Each week, they tailored a recipe to a specific disease state, whether it was high cholesterol or the needs of a lactating mother. Pham is hopeful that these efforts experiences will enable future patients to receive more meaningful and practical counsel.

VIETNAMESE VERMICELLI BOWL One of Pham’s go-to dishes at home in The Village at NEOMED is a Vietnamese vermicelli bowl. It’s loaded with fresh vegetables and it’s super versatile, she says, since you can make it vegan by swapping tofu for chicken, for example. The vermicelli itself is gluten-free, which is a plus for people with celiac disease. Here’s Pham’s quick overview of Vietnamese flavors: Vietnamese and Thai cuisine share a LOT of herbs, seasonings and flavors. Both cuisines rely on the following flavor profile: sweet (usually lump/rock sugar), salty (fish sauce), sour (tamarind), umami (MSG/chicken bouillon). Vietnamese recipes frequently use garlic, shallots, ginger and lemongrass (which is now available at chain groceries, not just specialty markets). One of the biggest differences between the two cuisines is that herbs or sauces are cooked into a dish in Thai cuisine but served on the side (as a topping or dipping sauce) in Vietnamese cuisine.

EASY LEMONGRASS-HONEY CHICKEN VERMICELLI BOWL ( BÚN GÀ NƯỚNG ) RECIPE BY KAREN PHAM

Serves 2-4 // Ingredients: Chicken Marinade 4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs 3 garlic cloves, minced 2 tablespoons lemongrass, minced 2 tablespoons soy sauce or tamari 1 tablespoon fish sauce 1 tablespoon honey ¼ teaspoon five-spice powder (optional) ¼ teaspoon curry powder (optional) Bowl Vermicelli rice noodles Lettuce (Romaine or iceberg), shredded (1 cup per serving) Cucumber, julienned (1/2 cup per serving) Herbs of choice: Cilantro, mint, Thai basil, dill Dipping Sauce (Nước chấm) 1 garlic clove, minced 1 Thai chili pepper, minced ¼ cup sugar ¼ cup hot water ¼ cup fish sauce, soy sauce or tamari 2 tablespoons lime juice Optional toppings: Scallion oil, fried shallots, crushed peanuts, pickled daikon radish and julienned carrots Directions: 1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

6. Debone and slice the chicken into strips.

2. In a medium-sized bowl, combine garlic, lemongrass, soy sauce, fish sauce, five-spice powder, curry powder and chicken. Mix well. Allow the chicken to marinate for at least 30 minutes (up to 1 day). Pro tip: debone the chicken thighs before marinating for quicker cook time and easier final assembly.

7. Bowl assembly: Per serving, place 1 cup of shredded lettuce, ½ cup cucumber, mixture of herbs and 1 cup vermicelli noodles into serving bowl. Layer the sliced chicken on top. Garnish with optional toppings (scallion oil, fried shallots, crushed peanuts, pickled daikon, carrots), if desired. Serve with nước chấm (dipping sauce).

3. Prepare vermicelli according to package instructions, taking care not to stir the noodles — they’ll break!

8. Dipping sauce: Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Stir until the sugar completely dissolves.

4. Wash all herbs. Shred lettuce of choice and julienne the cucumber. Set aside for serving. 5. Roast the chicken in the oven until completely cooked through (reaching an internal temperature of 175 degrees F), about 25-30 minutes. Photo: Mike Cardew

Watch a video of Karen Pham demonstrating her knife technique and learn more about this student’s early career as an actress, both at neomed.edu/extras.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

WHALE WATCHING

WHAT’S IN YOUR BACKPACK? BY JEANNE M. HOBAN

he patient has a broken arm. You are miles from the nearest medical facility and all you have with you is a small bag with a piece of gauze and some ACE bandage tape. What do you do? That’s the sort of scenario first-year College of Medicine student Justine Busby encountered in an advanced wilderness medicine course last fall. “The training focused on situational awareness,” she recalls. “One of the scenarios was that two people fell as they were roping down a small cliff. There was a snake that a lot of people in the training didn't notice at first, and then everything went awry. The instructor said, ‘Okay, everyone got bitten and now you're all dead!’ “You have to pay attention to your surroundings when you’re out in a wilderness situation. There may be something urgent in the environment that needs to be addressed before the medical emergency.” Busby discovered the training course through her involvement in the Wilderness Medicine Interest Group — also known as WildMed — at NEOMED. She now serves as the group’s vice president.

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE THIS WildMed was started by second-year medicine students Nicole Price (club president) and Christopher Roscoe in March 2021. The group is a chapter of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS), which includes 42 student interest groups at universities across the United States and Canada. Just one year in, the NEOMED group already has more than 100 members. “It grew really fast,” says Price. “When we started, we said we would be happy if we got 10 people.” The group brings low- or no-cost learning opportunities to students by collaborating with other organizations. For instance, at virtual WildMed Wednesdays, produced by the WMS group at Yale University, participants learn about topics from treating snake venom to wilderness dentistry and neurology in the wild. Speakers from the NEOMED community have included President John Langell, M.D. (photo, left at a “Climb with the President” event at NEOMED) and Savannah Chavez, M.D., an emergency medicine resident at Summa Health in Akron, who has conducted a series of mini lectures on wilderness medicine topics such as “When Plants and Animals Attack.” 28 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

A talk on space medicine by Philip C. Stepaniak, M.D. (’83) was especially popular. Through Ohio Search and Rescue, a group based in Columbus, Ohio, students have access to trainings twice a month to learn skills like land navigation, wilderness first aid and search tactics. They also can volunteer to assist on search-and-rescue missions in Ohio, West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania. Some members, including Price and Roscoe, are participating in a program to become a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine, completing requirements via the Wilderness Medical Society. And through a collaboration with True North Wilderness Survival School in Pittsburgh, 15 NEOMED students become certified in wilderness first aid. “It was pretty cool,” says Price. “The instructor would give us a scenario and then ask us what we’d do next. Whatever we had in our backpack was what we could use. The point was to figure out how to make do with what you have.” WildMed also partnered with Sequoia Wellness, the fitness center on campus, for the January 2022 re-opening of the Michelle and Rick Mulhern Rock Wall, which had closed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fifteen NEOMED students earned certification at wilderness first aid training. Bottom left: WildMed president Nicole Price and treasurer Christopher Roscoe

MAKE DO WITH WHAT YOU HAVE Founding member Roscoe, who serves as WildMed treasurer, finds parallels between wilderness medicine and his 11 years of experience in the military. “As a Navy corpsman, we ended up operating mostly in austere environments. As a Navy doctor, it will be the same deal: I'll be operating in austere environments, from desert to jungle to mountainous regions,” he says. “I think it's really good to know how to be prepared for that and how to be prepared for some weird things, like what do you do if you get stung by an unknown animal? Do you wait and see what happens? Or do you call in a $3 million helicopter to come pick somebody up and take them out?” Busby, who left active duty as a captain in the U.S. Army before beginning her studies at NEOMED, concurs. “What I learned from being in the Army is that you make do with what you have,” she says. “A lot of times there are minimal resources to get the mission done.” Photos: Chris Smanto and WildMed

THE TAMER SIDE OF WILDMED Wilderness medicine isn’t always intense. WildMed recently began partnering with the Portage (Ohio) County Park System to help teach wilderness preparedness to a lay audience. The “Wild Med Park” program will offer four sessions a year, based on wilderness first aid. Topics include what to pack for a hike and what to put in a first aid kit. The educational sessions will be followed by a student-led hike in the park system. Price notes that WildMed students will be able to apply the skills they learn to their chosen field, even if it isn’t wilderness medicine. As someone considering emergency medicine, she says, “I'm not going to be trekking the mountains. People do that, but I would like to practice in the clinical setting,” she said. “This is a good way to combine both things that I love.”

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

CLASS NOTES

1985

2008

Mark Libertin, M.D., has been promoted to executive director, National Medical Policy and Operations / Women’s Health Division at Aetna, a CVS Health Company. He also received his Master of Medical Management degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

Chris Dussel, M.D., has been promoted to chief medical officer of University Hospital Parma Medical Center. A practicing emergency medicine physician, Dr. Dussel previously served as the hospital’s associate chief medical officer.

2009

Romon Cancino, M.D., met with Jill Biden, Ed.D., as she visited the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. In his role as senior director of medical management for UT Health Physicians, he briefed the First Lady on his team's efforts in cancer prevention and screening.

1987 When it’s time to consider specialties, students rely on those already in the field for advice and counsel. Pradeep Manudhane, M.D., clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, remembers how important this mentorship was to him, and he wanted to help, so he found a way to connect students and alumni in his field of psychiatry. Dr. Manudhane, the head of an intensive treatment team for Phoenix Rising Behavioral Health in Canton, Ohio, organizes online meetings where students can attend breakout rooms to learn more about the profession of psychiatry and to ask questions, one on one. The field has been good to him, says Dr. Manudhane, who adds, “I’m glad to say I like psychiatry even more today than when I started in it.” To learn more about these Zoom events, contact Dr. Manudhane at pm13456@gmail.com. Are you involved in connecting students with alumni? Email marcom@neomed.edu with “Class Notes” in the subject line and tell us about it!

30 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

2014

Daniel Jones, Pharm.D., R.Ph., joined fellow alumni Louis Liming, Pharm.D. (’22) and Jacob Sweet, Pharm.D. (’22) to open Elite Pharmacy, an independent pharmacy in Canfield, Ohio. The trio always knew that independent pharmacy was in their future.

2015

Dustin Carneal, Pharm.D., received the Upsher-Smith Excellence in Innovation Award from the Ohio Pharmacists Association during the 144th OPA conference. The award recognizes a pharmacist who has demonstrated innovative pharmacy practice resulting in improved patient care.

2016

“We feel very strongly about it,” says Dr. Sweet. “The owners of today are getting older and retiring. The three of us felt that if younger generation pharmacists didn’t step up to take their place, then eventually there would be no independent pharmacies.” The pharmacy serves the entire state of Ohio with compounding in addition to daily operations at the store, where they dispense advice and prescriptions — including the occasional prescription for beavers and turkey vultures. Their advice for future pharmacists who want to follow their path? “Be prepared to hear a lot of nos,” says Dr. Sweet. “Don’t be afraid to reach out to people.” “Always have a forward-thinking attitude,” adds Dr. Jones. “The past is the past. Learn from your mistakes, but always be looking forward.”

2022

What is the first year of residency like? Past recipients of the Downing Urban Health Scholarship (Anna McLaughlin, M.D. ’18, far left, and Sara Brown, M.D. ’18, far right) shared advice, encouragement and war stories at a dinner with scholarship founder William Downing, M.D. (’22) (center) and the two newest recipients — Deni Drenic, M.D. (’21) (second from left) and Anna Cherian, M.D. (’22) (second from right). Dr. Downing, who ranked first in the Class of 2022 and holds a Harvard M.B.A., not only pursued his dream of serving as a primary care physician in an urban setting but established his scholarship to help others do so.

Michelle Barrord, M.D., has joined Kettering Physician Network Cancer Care Radiation Oncology in Kettering, Ohio as a radiation oncologist. She is part of a professional development team that mentors students pursuing careers in radiation oncology.

2019 Lauren Badzik, Pharm.D., has accepted a position at the Medicine Center Pharmacy in Canton, Ohio. She will be involved in patient care (including point-of-care testing for underserved communities in the Canton area), compounding and long-term care for underserved nursing homes.

The 2021-22 award recipient, Dr. Cherian, who is also a registered dietitian, matched at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she will enter a four-year program to earn a master’s degree in medical education and complete a pediatrics residency. A Medical Mutual scholarship recipient, she will return to Ohio to practice. The 2020-21 award recipient, Dr. Drenic, originally from Bosnia, is completing his first year of an internal medicine residency at MetroHealth in Cleveland.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

CONGRATULATIONS to our TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS! We love to hear about our graduates who are doing amazing things!

To support our future transformational leaders, please make a gift to the Blue Fund at neomed.edu/give/bluefund/

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDICAL UNIVERSIT Y

A L U M N I A S S O C I AT I O N

Accepting new patients Conveniently located on the campus of Northeast Ohio Medical University, NEOMED Health Care offers a SM

comprehensive suite of services in person or virtually with our expert team of clinicians.

Call for an appointment.

330.325.3202

{ Saluting those who make Creating Transformational Leaders possible }

THE NEOMED FAMILY MOURNS THE LOSS OF JUDITH E. BARNES LANCASTER, ESQ. 1940 – 2021

A NEOMED FOUNDATION BOARD MEMBER AND NEOMED TRUSTEE,

JUDY BELIEVED IN THE POWER OF EDUCATION. Thank you, Judy, for being an educator, advisor, supporter and gateway of hope for so many.

To learn how you can help NEOMED create more transformational leaders in the health professions through your philanthropy, contact Lindsey Loftus at 330.325.6261 or lloftus@neomed.edu

DONOR SPOTLIGHT

Judith E. Barnes Lancaster, Esq. was

JUDITH BARNES LANCASTER: THE RENT WE PAY BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

he activist and novelist Alice Walker used to say, “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” That comment struck Judith E. Barnes Lancaster, Esq., when she heard it. The late Canton attorney had lived her life that way, but never thought of it as a mantra. But she made it her own when she added a little something of her own in a speech later in life, saying “Activism and service are the rent we pay for living on the planet.”

34 C R E AT I N G

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S

better known as Judy to her friends on the NEOMED Foundation Board, where she served as chair and also as co-chair of the University’s Shine On comprehensive fundraising campaign. She lived life fully until her passing in December 2021. In thanks for her service, which included two years as a member of the NEOMED Board of Trustees, NEOMED bestowed the honorary degree Doctor of Science Honoris Causa on her in 2017.

By establishing a diversity student scholarship, Judy Barnes Lancaster sought to level the playing field.

CONTRIBUTING TO CHANGE Accepted to Howard University, the prestigious Historically Black College and University (HBCU) institution in Washington, D.C., she attended for a time but returned to Northeast Ohio and commuted to Kent State University. There, she was one of a handful of women in the sciences, and often the only Black woman taking a pre-med curriculum. In a video about her life, Barnes Lancaster unblinkingly recalled the bias against her in her pre-medical coursework. Barnes Lancaster had become interested in medical technology while at Kent State, and although she had passed the medical boards, she chose to pursue an interest in medical research. After marrying and graduating, she followed her husband to Cleveland. While she had her pick of five job offers, discrimination still reared its head, as she recalled in the video: Although she was the person who operated a specialized medical testing instrument, when the time came for a photo shoot by a media crew at the hospital where she worked, a blonde female secretary was posed in the photo in Barnes Lancaster’s place.

Photos: Chris Smanto

Judith Barnes Lancaster didn’t forget the hurt that systemic bias and discrimination caused her, and others. She raised her children with the desire to change attitudes and systems for the next generation. One way she will be remembered is through her establishment of the Judith E. Barnes Lancaster Diversity Student Scholarship in 2008. It stands as an investment in students’ futures from one who always looked ahead.

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDIC AL UNIVERSITY

4209 ST. RT. 44, PO BOX 95 ROOTSTOWN, OHIO 44272

100%! All NEOMED College of

Pharmacy students value experiential education. And they receive it early on.

BECOME A TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADER IN PHARMACY

Earn your Doctor of Pharmacy degree Learn from our well-respected faculty and strong academic program. Just 60 HOURS of prerequisite coursework needed to apply!

Results: High NAPLEX scores, high job placement, high-paying jobs!

The average salary is

$137K!

Access to residencies at the world’s most prestigious clinics/hospitals.

Pharmacists are doctors. Pharmacists are trained to be the medication experts. They dispense medications, manage pharmacy technicians, provide guidance on the best medications to use, give immunizations and advise on healthy lifestyles.

Careers? There are many — retail (community) pharmacist;

Early experience: NEOMED pharmacy students providing vaccines.

hospital pharmacist; ambulatory care pharmacist; informatics pharmacist; compounding pharmacist; pharmaceutical industry pharmacist; specialty pharmacist, e.g., oncology.

Now enrolling students for Fall 2022. Contact KJeroski@neomed.edu to learn more.

Ignite Magazine | Spring 2022

Articles inside

NORTHEAST OHIO MEDICAL UNIVERSITY

TASTES LIKE HOME

WHALE WATCHING

DONOR SPOTLIGHT

GLOBAL LEADERS

HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE

RESEARCH