Una Lomax-Emrick ’23 centers absurdity in comedy

Lomax-Emrick creates community through improv, stand-up, sketch comedy

BY GABRIELLA VULAKH SCIENCE & RESEARCH EDITOR

The Brown Neurosurgery Department recently published two preprints comparing the performances of Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Google Bard in the neurosurgery written board examinations and the neurosurgery oral board preparatory question bank.

They found that these AI models were able to pass the written exams with “flying colors.” When challenged to answer the more complicated oral exam questions, which require higher-order thinking based on clinical experience and exposure, the models still performed “superbly,” said Ziya Gokaslan, professor and chair of neurosurgery at the Warren Alpert Medi- cal school and neurosurgeon-in-chief at Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital. s ince its publication, the preprint focused on the oral board exam questions has ranked in the 99th percentile of the Altmetric Attention s core, which has tracked the amount of attention received by over 23 million online research outputs.

“It’s such an exploding story in the world and in medicine,” said Warren Alpert p r ofessor of Neurosurgery Albert Telfeian, who is also the director of minimally invasive endoscopic spine surgery at RIH and director of pediatric neurosurgery at Hasbro Children’s Hospital.

Inspiration for the study and key

BY DANA RICHIE SENIOR STAFF WRITER

The first joke that really made Una Lomax-Emrick ’23 laugh was “cockle-doodle-don’t.” At three years old, they “thought it was such a funny change of phrase.” s ince childhood, Lomax-Emrick has been committed to being “serious about being absurd.” Today, they pursue this passion through comedic performances like improv and stand-up comedy.

Though they have a background in performance and were “always doing little bits,” Lomax-Emrick did not think of themself as “someone who was very funny” until they got to college.

They said that their confidence in the world of comedy grew with their comfort in their transness and queerness. “When that sort of settled, I could picture who I was more, so I could picture what made certain things funny,” Lomax-Emrick added.

At Brown, they have found opportunities and communities within campus improv troupe IM p ROVidence, as a member of the Out of Bounds sketch comedy troupe and while performing stand-up comedy on their own.

Lomax-Emrick was first drawn to improv because it was a group of people “making the world as weird as it can be.”

“There’s so much going on, so if you don’t like a choice you made, you can make a new one, and generally, the audience will go with you,” they said. “It lets me take bigger swings and adjust from there.”

A captain of IM p ROVidence, Lomax-Emrick noted that the group is a supportive environment to take