LORI GROVER, ’85 Envisioning Better Health Care written by Davi Napoleon | photograph by Keith Weller
Much of what matters to Lori Latowski Grover, ’85, professionally and personally, began at college. During her senior year, an off-campus independent study enabled her to work with an optometrist practicing in Albion. By the time the study was over, she had discovered her career path and set her sights on optometry school. Extracurricular involvements, which included serving as president of the Panhellenic Council and activities at her sorority, Delta Gamma, helped her develop leadership skills and the ability to work collaboratively. And it was at Albion that she met her future husband, Michael Grover, ’86, now a physician and vice chair of family medicine at the Mayo Clinic-Scottsdale (Arizona). After completing her professional degree at the Illinois College of Optometry, Grover practiced in Michigan, Ohio, and California before she and her family settled in Scottsdale in 2003. Two years later she was invited to teach at Johns Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore, and in 2007 she received a Clinician Scientist Research Training Award from the National Eye Institute that gave her the opportunity to pursue a second graduate degree at Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health in combination with her faculty position at the Wilmer Eye Institute. Today, the nationally recognized clinician and educator continues her “double life,” maintaining her home with Mike in Arizona and traveling several times each month to Baltimore. She is now completing her Ph.D. in health policy and management, while directing research for the Leadership Program for Women Faculty based in Hopkins’ School of Medicine. She even manages to do grand rounds throughout the country and lecture internationally. “There were definitely trade-offs,” Grover says. “When you get an opportunity like this, you have to say ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’ and go with the flow.” Fortunately, her daughter, Kate, now at Tulane University in New Orleans, was already in high school when
18 | Io Triumphe!
A specialist in low vision rehabilitation, Lori Grover is currently an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research has focused particularly on the care of older patients with chronic vision impairment. She has developed a nationwide network of colleagues to help her evaluate treatments and establish best practices in their field.
Grover took on two addresses. “The timing for this opportunity was key. If she still had been in elementary school, it would have been more logistically challenging for all of us.” Even then, the Hopkins offer might have been hard to resist. Throughout her clinical career in vision impairment and rehabilitation, she had been involved in policy work at the state and national levels—health care delivery models and policy had always informed her practice. But when working one-on-one with a small group of patients, her view was necessarily narrow. This was her chance to broaden her perspective by interacting on a larger scale. At Hopkins, Grover has developed a nationwide research network of colleagues
who help her investigate the best ways to deliver health care, work that addresses a variety of issues, including cost-effectiveness and the use of electronic health records. “We don’t yet have a refined understanding of what constitutes ‘best practices’ for patients who live with chronic disease like vision impairment,” she says. “I’m in a field where we’re still moving forward to find the best processes of care.” In her research, she relies on colleagues who are still full-time clinicians in the trenches as she once was. She gathers information from their practices and patients about what they do and how it affects patient outcomes, and then evaluates how care might be further improved. She has remained in touch with Albion through her involvement with the College’s mentorship program. She gave an assist to Jordan Kus, ’12, who was impressed by Grover’s genuine interest in her. “I was looking for an internship and not having much luck. Without hesitation, Dr. Grover called around and got me an internship at Johns Hopkins—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Kus, who guesses Grover’s trust in her resulted from their shared Albion experience. “It really is a family. You meet someone on the street and bond because you both went to Albion,” she adds. It’s not surprising that Grover wants to give back to a school where the faculty is committed to sharing experiences and time with students. Grover recalls the late biologist, Ewell “Doc” Stowell, who took classes on fieldtrips into the wilds, where they would put together books of preserved flora. “We’d be trudging through the woods at 8 a.m., and he was always bounding ahead of the pack and in better shape than we students were,” Grover says. Biology professor Ruth Schmitter “was instrumental in obtaining an electron microscope at Albion, a huge deal at the time. She was incredibly generous with her time in sharing with us her knowledge about this new technology, and was a great example for all of us—and especially her women students—in many ways.”