Georgetown Health Summer 2023

Bir th care and beyond

Nurse-midwifery program celebrates 50 year s

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Editor’s Letter

Check Up

News & Research

Student Point of View

On Campus

Alumni Connections

Book Corner

Reflections on Health

Srdjan Mirkovic, M.D. (M’84, Parent’20)

From the Archives

A patient receives some dental care in this 1940 photo from the School of Dentistry archives. Georgetown’s dental school began as a department of the School of Medicine in 1901. Fifty years later it became a standalone school, which graduated its last class in 1990. At the time of its closure, Georgetown’s School of Dentistry was the second largest dental school in the country. Today, our dental alumni number over 3,400 and remain connected through regular reunions and newsletters.

Photo: Georgetown University Archives

Editor’s Letter

This is a special issue of Georgetown Health Magazine because, in addition to our regular content, we are introducing the university’s campaign to our alumni and friends. Called to Be: The Campaign for Georgetown is our most ambitious campaign to date, with a goal of raising $3 billion in support of university priorities.

When you read the “Called to Lead” story (pages 28–29), you’ll see that we’ve been reflecting on the different ways we are called to action. As a professional writer and editor here at Georgetown, I feel called to be a storyteller. I enjoy being able to help our magazine readers feel a connection to the university that has provided them with so many memories, friendships, and formative experiences.

Together with the editorial staff, I try to find and share stories that will be of interest to readers affiliated with the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Health, and Biomedical Graduate Education programs. From new research to interdisciplinary endeavors, there’s no shortage of news coming from Georgetown University.

The feature stories we’ve chosen for this issue offer some historical perspective on Georgetown’s trailblazing programs in bioethics, midwifery, and neuroscience. Each demonstrates cura personalis in its own unique way.

The first feature explores the establishment of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics and the legacy of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, who has given generations of health care professionals the tools they need to make tough decisions. The second feature highlights the first 50 years of the School of Nursing’s nurse-midwifery program and some of its alumni, many of whom consider advocacy and justice work an important aspect of patient care. The third feature demonstrates how Georgetown’s interdisciplinary approach to neuroscience gives its students a unique perspective on a complicated field. Other stories offer a glimpse into student field work in Ghana, a new partnership with Howard University, community-based participatory research in a laundromat, and much more.

The educators, students, and alumni highlighted in these pages are pushing our community forward while remaining grounded in Georgetown’s timeless values. I hope they inspire you to think about your own calling and how it connects with your Georgetown experience.

—Camille Scarborough, Editorial Team Lead

Dr. Healton to step down after 2023–2024 academic year —As we went to press on this issue of the magazine, Edward B. Healton, M.D., MPH, executive vice president for health sciences and executive dean of the School of Medicine, announced that he will be stepping down at the end of the 2023–2024 academic year. “I am grateful to Ed for his leadership, his work to strengthen our Medical Center and our University, his commitment to initiatives that have fostered greater diversity and inclusion, and his contributions as we responded to the challenges of a global pandemic,” President John J. DeGioia said in a message to the university community. We look forward to celebrating Dr. Healton’s legacy in the magazine in the coming year.

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

Heidi Atlas, Gabrielle Barone, Karen Doss Bowman, Kimberly Clarke, Kate Colwell (G’20), Patti North, Sara Piccini, Emily A. Riffle, Bhriana Smith, Karen Teber, Heather WilponeWelborn, Lauren Wolkoff (G’13)

Design Team

Wanda Felsenhardt, Ethan Jeon, Shikha Savdas

Project Managers

Hilary Koss, Francesca Falasca

University Photographer

Phil Humnicky

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Summer 2023 | Georgetown Health Magazine

Georgetown Health Magazine is distributed free of charge to alumni, parents, faculty, and staff. The diverse views in the magazine do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the university.

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This issue includes FSC-certified paper.

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Opening of the new pavilion is around the corner

n n In Fall 2023, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital plans to open its new Medical/Surgical Pavilion, currently under construction on the north side of campus.

Focusing on transplantation, orthopedics, neurosciences, and surgical services, the Medical/Surgical Pavilion will be a world-class facility for patients and visitors and a modern and dynamic setting for the practice of medicine, supporting the hospital’s role as an academic medical center. With MedStar Health as Georgetown’s academic health system partner, the Pavilion provides an elevated learning experience for medical and nursing students to practice clinical care and conduct research in a hospital setting with the most advanced technology and systems.

The approximately 477,000-squarefoot facility will house 156 private patient rooms, a 32-bed emergency department, 31 modern operating rooms, a new intraoperative MRI suite, a rooftop helipad with direct access to the emergency department, and three levels of underground parking.

To match the surrounding Georgetown neighborhood, the Pavilion’s footprint will feature acres of new green spaces with therapeutic landscaping.

Several construction milestones have been achieved in recent months. Inside the building, the emergency department and operating rooms are nearing completion, with finishing work being done on the floors, walls, and ceilings.

The exterior structure of the Pavilion is now substantially complete, and landscapers are focused on soil, grass, trees, and walkways for the green spaces.

When the Pavilion opens later this year, it will represent significant progress for MedStar Georgetown’s vision to be the trusted leader in caring for patients and advancing health in the Washington, DC, region and beyond. n

“Pharmanipulation” is a new podcast produced by PharmedOut, a faculty-led program that advances evidence-based prescribing and educates health care professionals and students about pharmaceutical and medical device marketing practices.

Photo: Phil Humnicky

As the new Medical/Surgical Pavilion nears completion, community members are excited to practice clinical care and conduct research in a state-of-the-art facility.

Better equity in cancer prevention

n n People from underserved communities often experience higher risk rates of certain cancers, challenges accessing care, and lower cure rates. Dedicated to confronting health disparities in cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, the Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation has made a gift establishing the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Prevention.

This gift extends the foundation’s longstanding partnership with Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, which began in 1989 when Ralph Lauren co-founded the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research.

The Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Prevention, which launched in April 2023, renames and reimagines existing practices of Georgetown’s Capital Breast Care Center, led by the Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities Research at Georgetown Lombardi. The reimagined center continues breast cancer screenings and supporting patients across the continuum of care while expanding to colorectal, lung, and prostate cancer—the most common cancers in the Washington, DC, region. Patients may access legal services through Georgetown’s Health Justice Alliance, a partnership between the Medical Center and Georgetown University Law Center.

“Every health system should be working to reduce health disparities,” says Lucile Adams-Campbell, the center’s new leader, who previously oversaw the Capital Breast Care Center and also serves as associate director for minority health and health disparities research at Georgetown Lombardi. “Georgetown is stepping up and playing a major role in addressing the needs of the community. And hopefully, by addressing those needs, we will begin to mitigate the disparities and move towards equity.” n

New accreditation for EM-CQSL program

n n The Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME) Board of Directors approved the initial accreditation of Georgetown University’s Executive Master’s in Clinical Quality, Safety, and Leadership (EM-CQSL) for a three-year term.

“The goal of our program is to create future leaders in the quality and safety field to improve health care for patients, families, and providers,” says Carole Hemmelgarn, EMCQSL director. The EM-CQSL is a part of the Biomedical Graduate Education program at Georgetown University Medical Center. “This accreditation is representative of the outstanding faculty at Georgetown University, and their excellence in teaching a current and real-world curriculum that prepares graduates to be sought-after leaders in their field.”

The EM-CQSL, developed by Georgetown University Medical Center in collaboration with MedStar Health, is an online program representing the environment that health care providers and patients encounter every day. The program immerses learners in advanced theory and concepts of health care quality, safety science, and organizational leadership using a unique interprofessional learning format.

“CAHME’s mission is to advance the quality of health care management education globally. CAHME-accredited programs have successfully navigated a thorough and careful accreditation process measured by experts in the field,” said Anthony Stanowski, president and CEO of CAHME. n

Photo: Phil Humnicky

The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Prevention took place in Spring 2023.

Treating anxiety disorders with mindfulness

n n According to results of a first-of-its-kind, randomized clinical trial led by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, a guided mindfulness-based stress reduction program was as effective as use of the gold-standard drug escitalopram for patients with anxiety disorders.

Anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, and fear of certain places or situations, including crowds and public transportation, all of which can lead to an increased risk for suicide, disability, and distress. Drugs that are currently prescribed can be very effective, but many patients either have difficulty getting them, do not respond to them, or find the side effects a barrier to consistent treatment.

“Our study provides evidence for clinicians, insurers, and health care systems to recommend, include, and provide reimbursement for mindfulness-based stress reduction as an

effective treatment for anxiety disorders because mindfulness

meditation is currently reimbursed by very few providers,” says Elizabeth Hoge, director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program, associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown, and the study’s first author. “A big advantage is that it doesn’t require a clinical degree to train someone to become a mindfulness facilitator. Additionally, sessions can be done outside of a medical setting, such as at a school or community center.”

The findings appeared in the November issue of JAMA Psychiatry, less than a month after the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended, for the first time, a screening for anxiety disorders due to their high prevalence. n

Linking racial discrimination to frailty

n n Discrimination experienced by Black people can affect their health and increase their frailty, which can be particularly impactful for cancer survivors, according to a new study by researchers at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and colleagues at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. The researchers assessed frailty by a number of factors, including whether a participant had several chronic diseases, poor muscle strength, and difficulty performing activities of daily living.

“Discrimination can act as a chronic stressor, which can throw the body off balance, resulting in increases in blood pressure, heart rate, metabolism, inflammation, and numerous other factors. These stressors can also increase rates of aging, leading to

greater risk of frailty,” says the study’s lead investigator, Jeanne Mandelblatt, director of the Georgetown Lombardi Institute for Cancer and Aging Research. “We hypothesize that discrimination can lead to an older biological age than a person’s actual chronological age. This is important to understand as there have been virtually no studies of the relationships between discrimination and aging in the setting of cancer survivorship.”

The researchers surveyed the participants about any aging-related diseases they had, their ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and most importantly, about major discrimination events they may have experienced, such as: being unfairly fired or denied a promotion in their job; not being hired for a job; being unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened, or abused by police officers; being unfairly discouraged by a teacher or advisor from continuing their education; unfairly receiving worse medical care than other people; being prevented from moving into a neighborhood; and moving into a neighborhood where neighbors made life difficult.

The findings appeared in the March issue of Cancer. n

FINDING THE ‘RIGHT AND GOOD HEALING ACTS’

Georgetown’s leadership in the complex field of medical ethics

By Sara Piccini | Design by Ethan Jeon

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Still, the woman remains steadfast in her position.

Enter Claudia Sotomayor, chief of the Ethics Consultation Service at the Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, called in by the patient’s care team. “I don’t come with an agenda,” she says. “I just want to make sure that I listen.”

The consultation service is available to treatment teams and families at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital 24 hours a day at no cost for each consultation.

“It took about 30 minutes for the patient to warm up to me,” recalls Sotomayor, an assistant professor of internal medicine. “After an hour or so, she revealed what was driving her decision.”

The woman, a single mother with two teenage girls, needed to pay her rent that day. If she didn’t deliver the check, she feared her family would be evicted. Sotomayor immediately called the hospital social work department, who contacted the landlord. Assured that her daughters were safe, the patient agreed to the treatment.

Ideas matter

Every day, in clinical settings across the world, health care providers confront similar ethical dilemmas. What if a patient has religious beliefs that preclude a needed blood transfusion? How do you treat an incapacitated patient who lacks a surrogate decision-maker? When a young resident disagrees with an attending physician’s course of treatment, how do you alleviate her moral distress?

For more than 50 years, Georgetown has pioneered the development of an ethical framework to guide practitioners in resolving these kinds of complex questions.

“One of my mantras is that ideas matter and they have concrete implications,” says Daniel Sulmasy (G’95), director of Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE) and Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics.

“There’s more to ethics than just being a practically wise and good person,” says Sulmasy, also a member of the Ethics Consultation Service. “We need those sorts of persons, but it is also helpful to have someone who knows the principles, so they can help clarify others’ thoughts, specify the range of views that might be acceptable or unacceptable—and then,

as my mentor Edmund Pellegrino would have said, ask the question, ‘What is the right and the good healing act for this patient in these circumstances?’

“That should be the aim of all the clinicians involved, that should be the aim of the family, and that should be the aim of the ethics consultants.”

Foundational role

Georgetown’s foundational role in medical ethics began with the establishment of the KIE in 1971, through a gift from Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., that endowed two faculty chairs and provided seed money for KIE’s Bioethics Research Library, which today houses the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on bioethics.

“The faculty who have been here over the years have done enormous work in establishing the vocabulary of bioethics,” says Sulmasy, noting the publication of seminal textbooks, case studies, and treatises.

Among these are Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979 by KIE scholars Tom Beauchamp (now retired) and James Childress (now at the University of Virginia), which introduced the core principles of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.

“I can tell you that if there’s anything that any medical student in the United States and in many places around the world knows about bioethics, it’s those four words,” Sulmasy says. “And they came from Georgetown.”

The KIE has developed international reach through its annual Intensive Bioethics Course (IBC), established four decades ago. In 2019, the IBC was relaunched in collaboration with the Pellegrino Center, reflecting the course’s greater emphasis on clinical bioethics.

“It’s been remarkable how much impact this course has had,” Sulmasy says. “We’ve trained people who now lead bioethics institutions around the U.S. and overseas as well.

“When I was reviewing its history, I noticed a photograph of a student from the third or fourth year of the course. That person, Mark Siegler, has just retired from directing the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.”

Apatient in critical condition refuses treatment, adamant that she be allowed to leave the hospital—even against medical advice. Staff doctors and nurses repeatedly talk with her about the risks. Finally, her attending physician says bluntly, “If you go home, you will die within a week or two.”

Dr. Pellegrino’s legacy

In 1983, the KIE welcomed a new director: Edmund Pellegrino, who had previously served as president of Catholic University. Over the course of his 65-year medical career, Pellegrino profoundly influenced the development of clinical bioethics through his scholarship and teaching.

Interested in remaining active in the clinical aspect of ethics, Pellegrino went on to establish the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center in 1991. In 2013, shortly before his death, Georgetown renamed the center in his honor.

“One very significant part of Dr. Pellegrino’s legacy was his way of looking at ethical situations that were embedded in the doctor-patient relationship,” says Myles N. Sheehan, director of the Pellegrino Center.

“He looked at what he called the internal morality of medicine—meaning that there were goods and ends you wanted to accomplish within that relationship,” says Sheehan, a profesor of medicine and the David Lauler Chair in Catholic Health Care Ethics.

“The famous four principles are very important in this, but the most important elements are the recognition of the patient’s vulnerability, the doctor’s commitment to help,

and then the process where you try to understand what is the most important healing decision for the patient’s good,” he says.

“So it’s more of a relational issue than a competing principles issue.”

Sheehan works alongside Sulmasy and Sotomayor in the Ethics Consultation Service, which employs what they call the Pellegrino ethics workup, grounded in Pellegrino’s fundamental question: What is the right and good healing act for this patient?

“So we first consider the right thing to do,” Sotomayor says. “What is the treatment option that in clinical judgment of the physician is most likely to benefit the patient?

“Then what is the good?” she continues. “Dr. Pellegrino explained to us that there were four levels of good that we have to look for when we’re caring for the patient. At the lowest level, we have the biomedical good.

“The second level is what the patient considers to be good for him or her. In this level, you take into consideration important things such as the cultural background and the family of the patient. As a patient, you bring a lot of yourself to the table, who you are and what you believe,” Sotomayor says.

“Then you have the third level, which is the protection of the dignity of the human person. And then the fourth level would be seeing the patient as a transcendental being. We think that spirituality plays a role in making these decisions.

“When we use these tenets, it is easier for us to discern what is fair and what is just.”

Preparing the next generation

The Pellegrino Center provides a wide range of programs for students and the broader community, including offerings in Catholic clinical education and neuroethics. In addition, it sponsors the annual Pellegrino Symposium and the Harvey Lecture, endowed in honor of John Collins Harvey, a founding member of the center and close colleague of Pellegrino.

The center also is responsible for bioethics education at Georgetown University School of Medicine and in the residency programs at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in addition to publishing a monthly newsletter for hospital staff, covering topical issues.

In 2019, the center established the Pellegrino Student Scholar program, an initiative designed to carry forward Pellegrino’s legacy to the next generation of health care providers. The program includes both medical and nursing students.

“One medical student and one nursing student would pair up each week to lead a discussion on different ethical problems, such as futility of care and end-of-life issues,” says Casey Haldeman (G’21), who was a Pellegrino Scholar

Photo: Leslie Kossoff

“As a patient, you bring a lot of yourself to the table, who you are and what you believe.”

—CLAUDIA SOTOMAYOR, M.D., DBE

while enrolled in the Clinical Nurse Leader program at the School of Nursing. “I spoke about how clinical ethics apply to all different kinds of health providers.”

Haldeman cites the issue of informed consent as an example. “What is the nurse’s responsibility in regards to consent? We’re witnessing what the doctor is telling the patient, and making sure that the patient understands what they’re consenting to. So there are two different roles there.”

For her culminating project, Haldeman worked with Sarah Vittone, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and member of the Ethics Consultation Service. “I did a reflection on clinical and nursing ethics through the pandemic, comparing and contrasting Dr. Pellegrino’s philosophy with Dr. Patricia Benner’s nursing theories—looking at the fact of illness, the trust of the patient, and the virtue of the provider.

“For the two years of the pandemic, nurses were the superheroes,” Haldeman said. “How do we lean into this new value in the nurse? How does trust in the physician translate into nursing? What kind of virtues make a good provider?”

Now a labor and delivery nurse at MedStar Harbor Hospital in Baltimore, Haldeman continues to use the knowledge she gained as a Pellegrino Scholar in her practice. “It comes through in something as simple as a birth plan,” she says. “If a mom wants a more natural birth, it may conflict with certain standards of care in the labor and delivery unit. So balancing the mom’s request with the plan of care that the doctor is prescribing can be a difficult area to navigate.

“I care for a very vulnerable population, so I make sure that the patient feels understood and that I’m advocating for them.

Photo: Leslie Kossoff

While enrolled in the School of Nursing’s Clinical Nurse Leader program, Casey Haldeman, M.S., R.N, was named a Pellegrino Scholar, teaming with students from the School of Medicine to explore complex issues in medical ethics.

“For the two years of the pandemic, nurses were the superheroes. How do we lean into this new value in the nurse?”

—CASEY HALDEMAN, M.S., R.N.

Theory and practice

Especially because it is a relatively new field, the discipline of bioethics continues to evolve through the interplay of theory and practice.

Daniel Sulmasy, for example, recently conducted a series of studies on surrogacy with colleagues from Johns Hopkins University in what they called “the bioethics version of The Newlywed Game.”

“Theory predicts that when a patient can’t speak for himself or herself, and we still want to recognize the patient’s autonomy, that we would ask a surrogate decision-maker what they think the patient would have wanted,” he says. “That leads to an empirically testable question.”

The researchers asked individuals acting as patients what treatment they would prefer, then asked their surrogates to predict their decision. Their predictions were correct in twothirds of the cases.

“That’s far from perfect,” Sulmasy says. “So the question goes back to theory. There’s an edict derived from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that ought implies can —if we make an ethical obligation it requires that people are able to carry it out.

“If it turns out that people really can’t do this with such accuracy, the question arises: Do we need to rethink what it

is that a surrogate should be doing? Should they be trying to do the ‘Vulcan mind meld’ like Dr. Spock in the old Star Trek TV show, extracting the autonomous preferences in the comatose patient? Or should they in fact be talking with physicians and nurses about the values and preferences of their loved one and then jointly coming up with a plan?”

“So that’s a way in which theory informs practice, practice informs theory and corrects it, and then theory feeds back to informed practice,” Sulmasy says.

Georgetown’s bioethicists are also actively engaged in discussions about the discipline of clinical bioethics itself. “The field is growing, and I think the need for it is becoming more evident as we grow,” Sotomayor says. “There are reports in the literature that an early ethics consultation can reduce hospital length of stay, for example. “The challenge is, how do we make sure that we provide the same level of practice everywhere, not just in academic institutions?

How are we going to provide ethics to that rural town in the middle of nowhere?”

The current certification process, a multiple choice exam focused on procedure, is a subject of intense debate, Sotomayor notes. “The process comes with a lot of growing pains. It’s hard to claim that someone is an expert in ethics. In so many different ways, you can’t really standardize it.”

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Daniel Sulmasy, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, leads the first phase in the development of Georgetown’s Emergent Ethics Network, an innovative collaboration focusing on ethical issues at the intersection of biomedicine, data, and the environment.

21st-century leadership

A half-century after helping to pioneer the field of bioethics, Georgetown is now poised to assume a new transformative role with the creation of an innovative collaborative structure, the Georgetown Emergent Ethics Network.

“It includes the Pellegrino Center, the Kennedy Institute, the new Environmental Justice Program, and the developing Center for Digital Ethics,” Myles Sheehan says. “Not only are new ethical issues arising in each of these four think tanks, the overlap is surprisingly large.

“If we think about the environment and the carbon footprint of health care, it’s pretty big. What can we do to reduce that?” he says. “And if we look in terms of broad justice, there are people who are suffering health problems because of changes in the environment. These would include things like the development of heat islands in areas of cities where the people are usually poor and lack good air conditioning and green space.”

Sulmasy, who is serving as the first director of the Emergent Ethics Network, points to the COVID-19 pandemic as a prime example of the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to solve contemporary ethical problems. “If you were to think of the three most important issues at the interface between technology, society, and ethics, I think anybody would say they are data, the environment, and biomedicine.

“COVID-19 happened as an environmental problem— how we relate to animals. It was transmitted environmentally through jet travel and spread locally through air conditioning systems,” he says. “And there are data questions. The algorithms we used to predict who should get the last ventilator may in fact be infected with implicit biases we’re not aware of.”

The four centers will collaborate in teaching and research, and plans call for the creation of joint professorships in such areas as medical ethics and environmental justice, as well as shared fellowships. “We’ll work together to try to solve cutting-edge problems in the interdisciplinary way that’s now necessary in the 21st century,” Sulmasy says.

Deep roots

In all aspects of teaching, research, and patient care, Georgetown’s approach to clinical bioethics is reflective of the university’s Catholic, Jesuit heritage. “One of the things I try to emphasize, without being preachy, is that being a Catholic and Jesuit medical center is a way in which the voice of that tradition helps to provide excellent care,” Sheehan says.

“Many things that are forces in contemporary society— the push for justice, equity, and diversity—you can find deeply rooted in Catholic teaching about human dignity,” he continues.

“And so to treat the human being as of exceptional worth is a way in which we can sometimes bridge differences in a pluralistic society, while honoring the tradition that Georgetown was founded in and continues today.” n

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Ethics Consultation Service, and Emergent Ethics Network are just a few of the many ways Georgetown is building a stronger, more ethical society, and becoming the university we are called to be. Learn more at calledtobe.georgetown.edu

Photo: Leslie Kossoff

“Many things that are forces in contemporary society—the push for justice, equity, and diversity—you can find deeply rooted in Catholic teaching about human dignity.”

—MYLES SHEEHAN, S.J., M.D.

LABOR of LOVE

Georgetown’s renowned nurse-midwifery program celebrates 50 years

By Jane Varner Malhotra | Design and illustrations by Wanda Felsenhardt

When reports in the early 1970s revealed alarmingly high infant mortality rates in the District of Columbia, leadership at Georgetown’s School of Nursing were moved to respond. In 1972, the school’s dean, Sister Rita Marie Bergeron, OSB, announced the establishment of a nine-month post-baccalaureate certificate program in nurse-midwifery.

The first of its kind in the DC area and one of only 10 in the country when it launched in 1973, the midwifery program at Georgetown emphasized holistic care, patient autonomy, and support for healthy births without unnecessary medical intervention. The trailblazing program began at a time when some states still prohibited certified nurse-midwives from legally practicing.

That year the School of Nursing and School of Medicine partnered to select Yuen Chou Liu as the program’s first director. Liu received

her nurse-midwife certification at the Booth Maternity Center in Philadelphia and delivered over 300 babies herself before becoming program director.

“Above all, the human dignity of the mother must be respected,” Liu said in an interview at the time about her appointment. “She is the one having the baby and not the professional.”

Importantly, midwives refer to their role at the birth as catching the baby, rather than delivering. They prefer language that centers the work of birth on the one giving birth.

The autonomy of the pregnant person in making health decisions, especially during labor and birth, was a pillar of Liu’s vision of a midwifery education and remains central to the program today.

In the 1970s the typical hospital birth experience was dramatically changing, recalls Jeanne McDermott (N’72), who spent five years working

stretcher to transport them to the delivery room right before the birth. There was quite a bit of resistance to this from some physicians at the time.”

The director of the midwifery education program during that period was Marilynn Schmidt, who brought her international background to the classroom and inspired students like McDermott to look globally at the practice. McDermott went on to teach nursing and midwifery in Malawi and Swaziland for several years before returning to the U.S. for a long career at National Institutes of Health, first in maternal health and then in international HIV research and training.

Birth care and beyond

What began as a nine-month in-person certificate program at Georgetown has evolved today into three online programs for the study of midwifery: a 27-month Master of Science dual degree in nurse-midwifery (NM) and women’s health nurse practitioner (WHNP), a 33-month Doctor of Nursing Practice in NM/WHNP, and a post-graduate certificate in NM. The programs include on-campus objective clinical intensives, in addition to synchronous and asynchronous online coursework, and clinical placement.

In addition to reproductive health care from pregnancy to postpartum, midwives study primary care, sexual and gynecologic health care, family planning, preconception

care, and more. Steeped in the mission and Jesuit values of the School of Nursing, the program emphasizes health equity and trauma-informed, person-centered, culturally responsive care for women, transgender, and gender diverse people through-

Melicia Escobar (NHS’04, DNP’22), program director for the NM/WHNP program and currently based in Philadelphia, notes that many people do not realize that midwifery is more than taking care of people prenatally. To be a midwife means to be many things, including champions of the physiologic or normal, natural processes of the body.

“Really, what you’re signing up for is being an advocate for your patients, advocating for yourself, and advocating for your profession because many people still don’t know what midwives are or what we do,” says Escobar. “In short, we are the protectors of the physiologic, whether that’s physiologic antepartum care, wellperson care, birth care, postpartum care, and newborn care up to the first 28 days of life.”

Different from doulas who provide labor support at birth and postpartum support in the home, midwives provide complete primary, gynecologic, pregnancy and birth care as independent practitioners who also partner with physicians on an as-needed basis. “We’re collaborators with our physician colleagues when aspects of the care reach a level of complexity outside our scope, resulting in the most comprehensive care,” she notes.

Although their focus is on care of healthy, low-risk people, midwives have a role even in precarious situations.

“I’ve taken care of really acute patients at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the Special Delivery Unit,” Escobar says. “There midwives work closely with physician colleagues to preserve any elements of that person’s experience that can be normalized. Even though your fetus may be at risk for neonatal complications— or maybe you are at higher risk because of a pregnancyrelated complication—if it is still safe to have a vaginal birth, I, as a midwife, am there to facilitate that experience and work with you to make sure that it happens in a way you’d like it to happen.”

Escobar is the oldest of five and daughter to a teen mom. She planned to become an OB/GYN, but after shadowing one at a hospital during college, knew she wanted to be part of a different model of birth care. She learned about midwives and moved to DC to work at Mary’s Center, a community health center, in the teen program focusing on primary and secondary pregnancy prevention and wellness. It was there that she was first exposed to midwives in clinical practice and was encouraged to apply to Georgetown by its founder Maria Gomez

(N’77). She completed a second bachelor’s degree in nursing from Georgetown, returned to Philadelphia for her midwifery degree at University of Pennsylvania, and later returned to Georgetown as faculty.

“Midwifery care is underutilized in this country,” says Escobar. “Traditionally midwives were wise women embedded in the community who saw and knew the whole family. Learning about someone’s context is part of the model of care in addition to having relevant health care knowledge. But it’s the marriage of the two—the art and the science of it—that is so beautiful and has proven time and time again the positive outcomes associated with midwifery care.”

Expanding the reach

In 2011, the Department of Nursing at the former School of Nursing & Health Studies made the leap to become Georgetown University’s first online degree-granting program. Entering the world of distance-based learning created a transformative opportunity to expand midwifery education beyond the Washington, DC area. Now both students and faculty across the country can be a part of Georgetown’s renowned program while based in their hometowns, and can remain to practice midwifery and women’s health in their communities upon graduation.

In addition, Georgetown partners with hundreds of clinical sites across the country to help match each student to a clinical preceptor in their region for hands-on learning. In many cases, Georgetown alumni serve in this critical role.

“When we think about workforce development, that’s one of the reasons Georgetown moved to an online platform. We’re able to reach students nationally and fill

geographical areas of need, what we call perinatal health deserts,” notes Escobar.

Today there are close to 300 students in 49 states who are enrolled in the three tracks in the midwifery education program. A big draw is the faculty who live in different regions across the country and bring a diverse set of experiences and expertise, including areas such as health equity in the care of populations that are vulnerable and marginalized, global health, legislative advocacy, community-based and complex birth, and expanded scope of practice and specialization.

Minnesota midwife Emily Rumsey (G’15) chose Georgetown’s program because she could attend remotely and study with faculty who are leaders in the field.

“I wanted to learn midwifery from the textbook writers,” she says, adding that the academically rigorous coursework made her a better midwife and that even a decade ago Georgetown’s technology for distance learning was impressive.

While Escobar is based in Philadelphia, the Assistant Program Director Heather Bradford is based in Seattle. Since her midwifery career began over 20 years ago, Bradford has attended almost 800 births and is currently researching weight bias among perinatal care providers and whether it may contribute to unnecessary cesarean births. She sees the regional diversity among faculty and students as a big plus.

“It’s a great part of the program that we can grow wherever students are,” Bradford says.

Faculty member Cindy Farley, based in Ohio, is coeditor of the classic midwifery text, Clinical Practice Guidelines for Midwifery and Women’s Health, now in its 6th edition. She is also co-editor and contributing author

“It’s the marriage of the two—the art and science of it—that is so beautiful and has proven time and time again the positive outcomes associated with midwifery care.”

—Melicia Escobar (NHS’04, DNP’22)

to the award-winning Prenatal and Postnatal Care: A Woman Centered Approach. She serves as a locum tenens midwife to a rural hospital and a birth center in Holmes County, Ohio, one of the largest Amish populations in the world. She has partnered with humanitarian organizations to provide education to midwives across the globe, including Honduras, Haiti, Guatemala, Liberia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Advocacy and justice

Another standout feature of Georgetown’s program is advocacy, says Escobar, who notes that the program brings a new cohort of students to DC every 15 weeks to meet with their representatives and senators on Capitol Hill “as both constituents and as members of our professional associations.

“As a student, they may feel intimidated,” Escobar shares. “But I remind them that they have knowledge about midwifery, and they are nurses. They know what is happening in their communities—how people are being cared for, where there are gaps. The education and advocacy serve a dual purpose: to empower students to step into their knowledge and expertise, and to convey important information that will inform their legislators’ health policy decisions.”

Many aspiring midwives are drawn to Georgetown’s health equity focus, says Escobar. The innovative curriculum was developed in response to students’ concerns about having the skills to meet the complex needs of their patients.

Students said they could “easily perform a speculum exam and palpate an abdomen. What’s really hard is talking to someone about their sexual health without feeling awkward, or taking care of someone who is trans for the first time, or someone who is living in a higher weight body without causing shame, or talking with

patients who live with food insecurity about nutrition,” Escobar notes. “How do I speak with a pregnant Black person about entering a perinatal health system that statistically fails them?”

Emily Rumsey works at a federally qualified health center caring primarily for an underserved immigrant population without insurance. “The social justice emphasis at Georgetown helped put my philosophical roots into action.”

She laments the modern medical system’s emphasis on dollars and cents over the more traditional practice of relationship-based care, which can take time to build.

“Midwives are able to care for high-risk patients who deserve midwifery too,” she adds. “We continue to work to reach them in appropriate ways. The quick turnaround for labor and delivery rooms often doesn’t leave time for the physiologic process to take place. Let it be low risk when it is low risk. Understanding the difference is what midwifery is all about.”

In some parts of the country, notes Bradford, midwives are still supervised by physicians—something the midwifery profession hopes to see change.

“Midwives are trained as independent health care clinicians. It can help expand midwifery tremendously and improve health outcomes if everyone was able to practice to their full scope allowed by their certification,” Bradford says.

A simple, natural process

Marsha Jackson (G’82) was a nurse and pregnant with her first child when she decided to become a childbirth educator. After her second child was born, she began assisting midwives at home births. Pregnant with her third child in 1979, she learned about a new master’s level midwifery program starting at Georgetown.

“The social justice emphasis at Georgetown helped put my philosophical roots into action."

—Emily Rumsey (G’15)

At first she was uncertain she’d be able to attend graduate school full-time due to financial concerns of a two-income family with three young children. But the program director at the time, Judy Melson Mercer, “encouraged me to go ahead and apply, and she would help find the funds,” Jackson recalls. “I was accepted, I took out a loan for our living expenses, and Judy was able to line up a grant to cover tuition. That was a real blessing!”

She remembers faculty and other students being very supportive as she pumped breastmilk during class. Overall the quality of the education was first rate, Jackson notes, shaped in part by Melson Mercer’s leadership as a midwife with a home birth practice of her own. The students gained clinical experience at DC General Hospital, serving primarily uninsured and poor communities. Jackson went on to become the first midwife to gain privileges at Georgetown University Hospital—no small feat for a Black woman who has encountered many instances of discrimination based not only on race, but also related to her clinical specialty.

“Midwifery brings out more of your inner workings,” she says. “I wasn’t always a very outgoing person. I was quiet, but I realized I had to reach deeper into myself to become more assertive. In order to be a midwife, and to be an advocate for clients, you have to really learn to pull that part of your being more to the surface.”

At Georgetown, in addition to the standard midwifery coursework, she remembers a very informative required

class about starting and maintaining a small business—a critical skill set that some students may not have viewed as important when there was so much basic midwifery coursework and skills to learn, Jackson says. “In hindsight, that business course served as a springboard for structuring my own private midwifery services.”

Jackson ran her own home birth practice in the DC area for five years. In addition, she worked with Cities-inSchools, a single-site Education Program and Adolescent Health Center providing comprehensive maternity and family planning services with births at DC General and Georgetown University Hospitals. In 1987, she and her midwifery classmate, Alice Bailes (G’82), cofounded BirthCare & Women’s Health, a home birth practice providing services in the District, Maryland, and Virginia. In 1991, they expanded the service to include the first accredited birth center in Alexandria. Bailes retired in 2013 and Jackson has continued leading the flourishing practice.

“As midwives, we address the health needs of the full person and we focus on birth as a normal, natural process. We screen for complications, of course, but in most cases birth is very simple. These babies just come, and it’s wonderful.”

Jackson said she feels the support of her ancestors in her work. One of her grandmothers owned a nursing home in New Jersey. Her other grandmother was a midwife in North Carolina—a part of her family history she learned about from her grandfather only after becoming a midwife herself.

Always active in her church, she serves as a deacon there, and sees a strong faith connection to her midwifery work.

“I feel like this is why God put me here on earth, to be there for women and families, and be that instrument to help them give birth in a way that’s empowering. Empowered people help make this a better world.”

The power of birth stories

Susana Mendez (G’19) comes from a long line of Mexican immigrant farm workers. As a child she would spend summers in Sahuayo, Mexico with her grandmother, a small town businesswoman who took care of their family farm and who gave birth to nine children, all at home assisted by a homebirth midwife. As a young girl, Mendez loved listening to her grandmother’s riveting birth stories, so much that she would often find herself playing midwife with her cousins, recreating her grandmother’s birth stories and delivering dolls tucked under her cousins’ shirts.

Her passion for birth led her to become an obstetrical flight nurse with Stanford Hospital, traveling by helicopter for high risk obstetrical transfers requiring emergent delivery. But in her heart she felt called

to midwifery, so she joined the master’s program at Georgetown. Today she practices in her home state of California at a large inner-city hospital with immigrant families like her own. “The number of Latina midwives is small. Being here, Spanish-speaking in Northern California, I find myself taking care of a lot of women that look like me, my mother, and my grandmother, and who also face the same systemic obstacles. It’s really fulfilling to be able to give back to the pregnant people of this community.”

She chose to work particularly with marginalized, low-income, underserved people in her community using a model of group prenatal care. In addition to individualized care, her practice incorporates group-led visits with other pregnant people, fostering a sense of shared experience, and validating many aspects of pregnancy to build a sense of community.

“In this country, motherhood can be so isolating,” says Mendez. “There’s no support for people who are estranged from their family members. The group care model brings that sense of community back to the birthing and pregnancy experiences so that they can lean on each other, because birthing and raising children takes a village. And sometimes, it’s impossible to provide that support with one-on-one care.”

Mendez notes that midwives overcome many obstacles in the health care system to give women the care they deserve.

“It really comes down to fostering a safe birthing space for women, facilitating physiological birth, and minimizing intervention when possible,” she says. “They deserve to birth the way that their body was made to. It’s really easy for marginalized women and women of color to have that voice in their care and in their birth when they are cared for by midwives.”

The benefits of midwifery care continue beyond the birth experience, Mendez adds. “The mother-child duo

is getting off to a good start that will ripple into the rest of their lives.”

As a student, she appreciated the extra support Georgetown provided during challenging times. “They did a really good job of making sure that I stayed with the program. They provided me with the necessary guardrails, and they protected me—in essence what I do with the women that I take care of everyday.”

Mendez sees her own birth story among the people she cares for.

“I am the daughter of an immigrant just like the babies I help birth everyday. I want nothing more than to see these families succeed,” she says. “I want to create the most safe and beautiful environment for the babies that are coming into this new world. In my family I am the first generation to have gone to college, first to get my master’s, and now to bring new life into this world and give them as much as was given to me.”

She pauses.

“Birth is this miracle that I get to participate in every day. It’s so beautiful. Why wouldn’t everyone want to be a midwife?” n

Heather Wilpone-Wellborn contributed to this article.

The School of Nursing’s midwifery program is just one of the many ways Georgetown is advancing the health and security of people and the planet as we become the university we are called to be. Learn more at calledtobe.georgetown.edu.

“ B irth is this miracle that I get to participate in every day. It’s so beautiful. Why wouldn’t everyone want to be a midwife?”

—Susana Mendez (G’19)

THE CURIOUS BRAIN

Interdisciplinary solutions for the complex problems of neuroscience

By Lauren Wolkoff | Design by Shikha Savdas

From the time he was a young boy, fascinated with dinosaurs and his rock collection, Zac Colon (G’21) always felt drawn to the sciences. He liked understanding how organisms and systems worked—at one point even informing his parents he wanted to autopsy a dead squirrel.

As his scientific curiosity matured, Colon’s interests evolved. Upon graduating college with a degree in microbiology, he began working in a food pathology lab at the Institute for Environmental Health. Then Colon’s father, a retired Navy SEAL, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. This event sparked Colon’s interest in studying traumatic brain injury (TBI)—first as a volunteer in a rehabilitation center for veterans who had suffered head, neck, and spinal injuries, then going on to complete his master’s in integrative neuroscience at Georgetown.

Colon’s winding scientific journey ultimately led him to where he is today: a Ph.D. candidate in Georgetown’s Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience (IPN).

For Colon, the appeal of the program is baked into the name: interdisciplinary. The IPN offers the ability to see neuroscience through the lens of multiple disciplines, not only allowing for the possibility of students broadening or shifting their focus, but actively facilitating it.

It was this spirit—the ethos of curiosity and exploration—that sealed the deal for Colon.

“Georgetown felt different in that I wasn’t being asked to choose my focus and my mentor right at the start. They wanted us to learn about other disciplines, and about different lab cultures, before settling down,” Colon says. “It has always felt that they wanted to make sure I had a well-rounded experience. That was the difference that appealed to me most.”

Colon ended up changing his focus from studying TBI to exploring the interaction between neurons and the peripheral immune system—or how the brain directs immune response throughout the body. This was in part due to a positive experience he had during his first year in the lab of Kathleen MaguireZeiss, professor and chair of the department of neurology, who became his mentor.

“I realized the importance of the culture of a lab—the people you are working with matter as much as what you’re studying,” Colon says.

Neurons don’t fire in isolation

It may seem contradictory that what is fundamentally a neuroscience doctoral program does not reside in the neuroscience department.

In fact, the program is in effect a freestanding island boasting more than 50 faculty members representing 11 departments across Georgetown: neuroscience; pharmacology & physiology; biochemistry; neurology; pediatrics; ophthalmology; psychology; oncology; biology; nephrology & hypertension; and physics.

This model—one that actively resists boundaries or classification—has stood the test of time. When the program was started nearly 30 years ago, in 1994, Georgetown’s neuroscience department didn’t yet exist.

The IPN’s founding director Karen Gale, who died in 2014, identified a need and an opportunity—to tap into the wealth of expertise in neuroscience that lived across Georgetown University Medical Center and the College of Arts and Sciences and fashion it into a new kind of doctoral program. Beyond shaping the IPN into a world-class training program, Gale set out to cultivate a thriving neuroscience community at Georgetown.

Photo: iStock

IPN Director Ashley VanMeter says Gale’s vision for the neurosciences at Georgetown has endured, and is now part of the program’s DNA.

“The word interdisciplinary is not just a fancy title—it speaks to how our program operates and how it has been designed from the very beginning,” says VanMeter, a professor in the Department of Neurology who also directs Georgetown’s Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging. “Neuroscience itself is inherently interdisciplinary. By not being tied to any one department, we have the freedom and flexibility to draw on the expertise from across the university.”

A student interested in studying cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease, for example, can examine it through various lenses—not only learning about the degeneration of neural pathways that leads to cognitive decline, but also receiving training in the cognitive and behavioral effects on patients experiencing the disease.

The result is a more holistic approach than would traditionally be seen in a neuroscience Ph.D. program.

“The brain is incredibly complicated,” VanMeter says. “If you focus on a tiny part and not the full hierarchy, you will lose the bigger picture of cognitive health and wellness of the brain overall.”

For a relatively small, tight-knit program—the cohort that started in 2022 has just 12 students—the IPN has remarkable reach. Demonstrating the strength of neurosciences at Georgetown, and the cross-cutting nature of the IPN, its students are eligible for eight different NIH-funded training grants, known as T-32s, led by IPN faculty housed in a variety of departments.

Maguire-Zeiss, who preceded VanMeter as IPN director, says that Gale’s legacy is a growing community of wellrounded, curious lifelong learners.

Continued on page 24

“Having this community of people who are taking different approaches to the same issue means our students have the tools to solve more complex problems out in the world.”

—Kathy Maguire-Zeiss, Ph.D.

IPN Ph.D. candidate Zac Colon (G’21) works with his Kathy Maguire-Zeiss, Ph.D., professor and chair of the department of neurology.

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Diversifying the neuroscience workforce

Women, trans and nonbinary persons, members of racial and ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, and people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds are often disenfranchised from scientific research and also face disparities in health outcomes. Further, scientific trainees in these populations might not have the same opportunities for academic or professional growth as their peers.

That is why the IPN prioritizes promoting diversity and inclusion in the neurosciences, and has steadily increased its recruitment and enrollment of people who are historically underrepresented in the sciences. As a transgender woman, VanMeter places great emphasis on fostering inclusivity.

“Creating more opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities to succeed in the neurosciences has been an important priority of the program since the beginning,” VanMeter says.

The IPN has a higher number of students who are women than the national average. Since 2011, 73% of the total student population in the IPN have been women.

The program has also steadily increased recruitment of applicants from underrepresented minority groups. In the past 15 years, 27% of all students enrolled were from underrepresented groups, including racial and ethnic minority groups and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Of those currently enrolled, 29% are from underrepresented groups. These outcomes compare favorably with the average for neuroscience doctoral programs, reported most recently as 18%.

The NIH identifies those who have been shown to be underrepresented in health-related sciences and biomedical research on a national basis as Black people; Hispanics or Latino people; American Indians or Alaska Natives; Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders; women; people with disabilities; and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Of the 12 students that matriculated in 2022, half are from underrepresented groups.

A new NIH training grant at Georgetown, the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) fellowship, offers students from underrepresented groups the opportunity to pursue careers in the biomedical sciences by providing financial support, mentorship, coaching, and professional development. Launched in 2022, IMSD supports seven Ph.D. programs at Georgetown, including the IPN. One of the five students from the first IMSD cohort is an IPN student.

Much like the IPN, the IMSD training program is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on some 60 faculty members from across seven

graduate programs and departments to prepare students for careers in the biomedical scientific workforce.

Caleb McKinney, a principal investigator on the IMSD grant along with Maguire-Zeiss and Ronda Rolfes, professor in the department of biology, underscores the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to scientific training.

“The scientists we train have to be nimble in how they navigate disciplines,” says McKinney, an associate professor of rehabilitation medicine and interim assistant vice president of the master’s degree in Program Administration and Development at Georgetown University Medical Center. “And they need to be able to contextualize what they’re learning in the classroom and in the lab to have a broad-based impact in whatever their chosen career might be.”

With their shared focus on interdisciplinarity and diversity and inclusion, McKinney says the IPN and IMSD exemplify the Georgetown ethos of cura personalis—care of the whole person. He says both the doctoral program and the training grant emphasize a holistic approach to scientific training that recognizes and nurtures students for all that they bring, including their background, diverse interests, passions, and vulnerability.

“It’s really important that we are creating an academic environment where students feel they can be themselves, and see themselves as part of a broader community,” McKinney says. “This is how we will strengthen the pipeline of diversity in the biomedical workforce. And it’s how our graduates will then reach a hand to help others along their own path.”

Photo: Courtesy of Ashley VanMeter

Neurology Professor and IPN Director Ashley VanMeter, Ph.D., is also director of Georgetown’s Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging.

“The idea that neurons don’t fire in isolation, but rather fire in ensembles to make a stronger connection, can also be applied to the program,” Maguire-Zeiss says. “Having this community of people who are taking different approaches to the same issue means our students have the tools to solve more complex problems out in the world.”

Beyond academia

The IPN may be the hub, but the mentors and collaborators help create a ripple effect well beyond the bounds of the program. In fact, the program deliberately aims to remove barriers and build bridges to other disciplines and institutions.

“One thing we have come to appreciate is that a career in academia is not necessarily the end goal for all our students,” says VanMeter. “There are many different avenues they can pursue, from shaping policy to working in the private sector, scientific associations, or a clinical setting. We encourage them to explore their options.”

Georgetown’s location in the nation’s capital makes it easy to connect students with policy organizations in the area, such as the National Academy of Sciences or the Society for Neuroscience. Students interested in learning more about clinical applications of neuroscience can choose mentors from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, Children’s National Hospital, or the MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital, Georgetown’s academic health system partner.

Over the course of three decades, 162 students have completed the IPN. Less than half—just 42%—of these graduates work in academia, while 18% work in government or policy positions, and another 8% work in business. The remaining 32% work in a variety of fields, including health care, technology, biotech, science communications, and nonprofit research.

Regardless of the path a student chooses, Vaidya stresses that a breadth of experience will make any scientist better at their specialty because they are not limited to skills they learned in one lab.

“We are preparing students to occupy much broader spaces—and there are more options than ever,” she says.

A sense of community

Perhaps because the IPN doesn’t fall neatly into any one department, the program’s students tend to seek out and cultivate community where they can. This might mean forming collaborations with other students from other graduate programs who share their classes, starting interdisciplinary clubs, and teaming up on community outreach initiatives.

This sense of community is not limited to IPN students— they are part of a much broader ecosystem at Georgetown that includes postdoctoral fellows and undergraduate students with diverse academic backgrounds, but with a shared interest in understanding the brain. These students interact in formal and informal ways, exchanging advice on courses, assignments, experiments, and even career opportunities.

“It’s like a big family,” Vaidya says. “There is a lot of advice and mentorship that gets passed along among the postdocs, the IPN students, and undergraduate students—many of whom hope to become medical students. These interactions are invaluable.”

As the first doctoral candidate in his family, Colon says the sense of community he has experienced has bolstered his confidence and helped set him up for success.

“In academia it’s not uncommon for mentors to end up training a ‘mini-me’—they are just passing along what they know,” Maguire-Zeiss says. “We actively work against that tendency by creating a large support network of strong connections around our students so they can be exposed to as much as possible during their time with us.”

The skills students learn outside the lab are becoming increasingly important as students see the value in being able to apply their scientific knowledge to a variety of different settings.

“Academia is a pyramid—there are only so many faculty and research positions,” says Chandan Vaidya, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor in the psychology department and an IPN faculty member. “We are no longer training students exclusively for these narrow careers in academia.”

“Coming into the program, I didn’t really understand all that goes into getting a Ph.D. Especially as a person of color, I had hardly seen people in my family or other people of color who were in scientific roles,” Colon says. “Right away I saw that there were faculty and students here who want me to succeed, and who care about me as a person, and not just as a student or scientist.”

Learning to teach

For Sikoya Ashburn (G’18, G’20), who earned her doctorate from the IPN in 2020, the program’s signature was in the opportunities it gave her, not just to learn, but to teach. The culture was oriented toward encouraging the doctoral candidates to share their knowledge with others.

This was particularly meaningful to Ashburn, a Black woman who, as a young girl interested in science, struggled to find role models in the sciences who looked like her.

“In sixth grade we had to research a scientist, and I couldn’t find a Black woman scientist in our library,” Ash-

“Neuroscience itself is inherently interdisciplinary. By not being tied to any one department, we have the freedom and flexibility to draw on the expertise from across the university.”

—Ashley VanMeter, Ph.D.

burn says. “I refused to believe they didn’t exist, and I kept looking, but I still remember that feeling.”

Ashburn jumped on opportunities to work with DC students during her time in the program, taking part in activities such as Brain Awareness Week, an internationally recognized event where science students, including a group at Georgetown, teach middle schoolers about the brain. She also joined fellow students in teaching science at Bancroft Elementary School, a bilingual English-Spanish public elementary school in the District.

Ashburn’s mentor, Guinevere Eden, professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University Medical Center and director of the Center for the Study of Learning, encouraged her community outreach activities. Ashburn was also able to be a course director for a few semesters and had several opportunities to give lectures on her area of research, the cerebellum’s involvement in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ashburn has already garnered recognition as a scientific role model. In 2020, she was listed as one of the 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists by Cell Mentor, and in 2022, she was awarded a competitive fellowship from the L’Oreal for Women in Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement in Science.

She credits her time at Georgetown and the IPN for giving her the tools and opportunities to see herself as a teacher and mentor.

“One of my favorite moments was during Brain Awareness Week. There was a little Black girl there who had an afro, and I also had an afro, and she turned around and asked me if I was the adult version of her,” Ashburn says. “Honestly, it made my entire year.”

The IPN’s creative interdisciplinary approach helps students step out of their comfort zones and tap into the best version of themselves, says Maguire-Zeiss. She says they are are trained to pursue their careers “being more authentically themselves and not necessarily just doing what’s expected.”

“Our job as mentors is to help them figure out their passion, what they’re good at, and how that passion shows up in the world,” she says. “That’s the sweet spot—and I think we give them everything they need to do that.” n

The Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience is just one of the many ways Georgetown is shaping the future of teaching, research, and learning as we become the university we are called to be. Learn more at calledtobe.georgetown.edu .

Photo: Phil Humnicky

(Left to right) Psychology professor Chandan Vaidya, Ph.D., pre-med student Brenna Towell (C’23), and IPN graduate student Adam Kaminsky, Ph.D. (G’26) discuss a project involving the brain’s executive control and factors involving its physical and mental breakdown.

From the Hilltop to the backroads of Ghana

School of Health extends curriculum far beyond the classroom

By Bhriana Smith

Students enrolled in the School of Health are offered a variety of experiential learning opportunities, including study abroad, communitybased collaborations, research conferences, and the school’s Discovery Center.

Georgetown Health Magazine recently spoke with two undergraduate global health majors, Clare Westerman (H’23) and Emme Rogers (H’22), who traveled from the Hilltop to Ghana in Fall 2022.

The students lived in Ho, Ghana, occasionally traveling to Hohoe and other districts within the Volta Region to research reproductive and sexual health. Given the short time period the students were in Ghana, they drew from existing, raw datasets to conduct original data analysis while engaging with the local communities, working closely with the Institute of Health Research (IHR) at the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS).

Why study global health?

Clare: As a pre-med student, I am interested in health from the medical perspective, but I also want to see health and health access from the social perspective—examining what health looks like in terms of health determinants. This knowledge will help me learn how to serve communities.

Emme: I wanted to get a more holistic view of what affects health, especially in our global society. I really enjoy learning about the social determinants of health and how everything comes together to create this picture of health and what is healthy.

What was it like living in Ghana?

Clare: I’m from Boston, so Ghana was very different. I loved seeing the farm animals, mainly the goats and chickens, run around. The atmosphere was very happy, and the people were friendly. It was truly a wonderful experience.

Emme: Though I grew up as an army brat, living in many different places, I can confidently say I am from the Midwest.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived in Ghana, but I quickly realized similarities—like the easygoing lifestyle and the friendliness of the people—in the areas of Ghana where I stayed.

What were your research projects about?

Emme: My theme was maternal and child health. There is a high incidence of prenatal care, at 98%, but there is a certain medication mothers must take throughout their pregnancy to prevent malaria, and that uptake is only 60%. I wanted to

Photo: Courtesy of Clare Westerman

Clare Westerman (H’23) and Emme Rogers (H’22) visit a monkey sanctuary during their research trip to Ho, Ghana.

understand that gap, and I discovered that health care providers were not informed on current policy, which impacted how they educated expecting mothers.

Clare: I explored the different factors affecting sexual and reproductive health in adolescents. I focused on a specific district near Ho because it had a really high rate of adolescent pregnancy. I was looking at the determinants of sexual health knowledge and engagement with different services. This particular district started an adolescent health club initiative to respond to pregnancy rates; for my project, I analyzed the factors that predict engagement with those clubs, in addition to some other key markers of sexual health.

How would you compare what you learned working with the community to what you have learned in a traditional, classroom setting?

Clare: At Georgetown, we’ve talked about what it looks like to work with people from different cultures or to integrate into someone else’s culture. We’ve discussed the different ways we can be culturally responsive and have cultural humility, but actually experiencing it is an entirely different scenario. It’s something you have to do to fully understand, and I wouldn’t understand it today if I hadn’t had the opportunity to research in Ghana.

Emme: Conducting field surveys was a humbling experience. In global health studies, there are so many universal surveys and indicators, but this experience taught me the importance of localizing that information, and what it looks like to practically learn from a community. My time in Ghana taught me that there are a lot of things about the world that I don’t know.

What was it like working with professionals in the fields you aspire to go into?

Emme: The staff at the University of Health and Allied Sciences was really open to helping us with our projects, even though they were clearly very busy. I was impressed by how much research they were pumping out, especially since it is a young school.

Clare: The people at the Institute of Health Research were fantastic. They are diligent and stellar scholars, and they took such good care of us. n

The School of Health’s Discovery Center is just one of the ways Georgetown is ensuring our student community thrives as we become the university we are called to be. Learn more at calledtobe.georgetown.edu.

Photos: Courtesy of Emme Rogers

Left: Emme Rodgers (H’22) helps measure a young baby during her field work related to maternal and child health. Right: The pair traversed quiet country roads throughout the Volta Region during their experiential learning experience.

In global health studies, there are so many universal surveys and indicators, but this experience taught me the importance of localizing that information, and what it looks like to practically learn from a community.

Emme Rogers (H’22)

Called to Lead

With the recent launch of Called to Be: The Campaign for Georgetown, community members throughout the university have been considering what the campaign theme means to them, on a personal and professional level. Georgetown Health Magazine recently spoke with Georgetown’s health deans to gather their reflections.

Photos: Sarah Gormley / Mike DeRario / Phil Humnicky

“I am called to cultivate an environment that fosters discovery and education leading to equitable improvements in human health.”

Edward B. Healton, M.D., MPH Executive Vice President for Health Sciences

“I’m called to be a bold and courageous leader.”

Roberta Waite, Ed.D., R.N., PMHCNS, ANEF, FAAN Dean, School of Nursing

“I’m called to be someone who fights for equity, justice, and inclusion.”

Lee Jones, M.D. Dean for Medical Education; Professor of Psychiatry; Georgetown University School of Medicine

By Patti North

“I am called to be a change agent and to help make the world better by doing work that matters, has impact, and brings with it struggle, satisfaction, and the joy of doing something well.”

Louis M. Weiner, M.D. Director, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center

“I am called to be an advocate for biomedical science, research, and education by emphasizing its pivotal importance in our world.”

Anna T. Riegel, Ph.D. Interim Vice President, Biomedical Education and Research

Learn more about the Called to Be campaign at calledtobe.georgetown.edu

Photos: Phil Humnicky

/ Lisa Helfert

“I’m called to be the change I want to see in the world.”

Christopher J. King, Ph.D., MHSc, FACHE Dean, School of Health

Fund a Fellow program celebrates 10 years

By Camille Scarborough

More than 80 million Americans will be affected by a neurodegenerative disorder by 2030, yet there are simply not enough specialists to meet this growing demand. Only about 10% of current patients see a specialist, putting most at risk for complications.

“When receiving my Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, I asked the general neurologist how to educate myself on PD, and what I should be doing. The response: ‘Go Google it’,” says Mary Roney (B’76), who lives near Colorado Springs, Colorado. She eventually found a specialist 70 miles away in Denver. “I am grateful to have found medical support and feel strongly that all Parkinson patients have access to a movement disorder specialist.”

Roney recently gave a significant gift to Georgetown’s Fund a Fellow program.

The program, which began in 2013 with support from Rick Schena and Janis Buchanan, provides funding to train early-career neurologists as movement disorders specialists. After a two-year fellowship focused on movement and memory disorders and conducting clinical trials, they are able to better diagnose patients and provide access to the latest treatments available.

The result is better access to care and quality of life for patients nationwide.

“Movement disorders manifest differently in each individual, requiring a specialist to provide an accurate diagnosis and knowledge of the newest treatments,” explains Fernando Pagan, director of the Movement Disorders Program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and medical director of Georgetown University Medical Center’s Translational Neurotherapeutics Program. “Education, research, and clinical care improve yearly if we continue training young neurologists.”

The unique program is funded entirely by philanthropy, 100% of which directly supports the fellows. In the past decade, contributions from more than 1400 donors totaling nearly $2.9 million have allowed Georgetown faculty to train 22 movement and memory disorder specialists, twice the number that would have been trained otherwise.

“Georgetown’s Fund a Fellow program has already added significantly to the number of much needed specialists in this field,” add recent donors Robert and Jane Loeffler. “Our gift honors Dr. Pagan’s research, and furthers all efforts to enhance patient care.” n

Where are they now? Past fellows are serving patients in communities throughout the United States. The Movement and Memory Disorders Program is one of only 31 U.S. “Centers for Excellence,” as designed by the Parkinson’s Foundation.

—Yasar Torres-Yaghi, M.D. Fund a Fellow program graduate, assistant professor of neurology at the School of Medicine, current director for the

Parkinsonism and Dementia Clinic at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital

“We use the cura personalis approach to holistically address more than the movements; we want to improve the overall wellbeing of each individual that we have the honor to care for.”

Students help refugees navigate health system

By Bhriana Smith and Heather Wilpone-Wellborn

The Health Navigator Program—a student-founded effort within the School of Medicine that aims to remove health access barriers for refugees—was born in 2021 after a community-based learning project revealed issues refugees encountered. Emily Phelps (C’19, G’20, M’24), Ruba Omeira (M’24), Thu Dao (NHS’17, M’24), and Mohamad Almasri (M’24) co-founded the program with the goal of pinpointing critical resources, simplifying the complex process of obtaining a health care provider, and offering advice to newly arrived refugees on the ways they can navigate the healthcare system.

The program started as an extension of the HOYA Clinic, and like the HOYA Clinic, it relies heavily on volunteer efforts. In the program’s first year, there were 100 medical, nursing, and master’s degree student-volunteers.

The program’s first cycle assisted 60 refugee families, most of whom were from Afghanistan. Now in its second cycle, the program offers a brief orientation for volunteers before assigning them in pairs with two students from a different program—for example, a medical student and a nursing student.

Currently, the program works with two local refugee agencies: Catholic Charities and the Ethiopian Community Development Council. Each student pair is matched with a family via one of the two agencies. The program recently received approval for interpretation services through MedStar’s language line, allowing volunteers to communicate more effectively with refugees.

The founders hope the program becomes a mainstay in the School of Medicine. n

Reaching the BellRinger finish line

By Gabrielle Barone

Every avid bicyclist knows how to travel a bumpy road. When faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, the planning committee for BellRinger’s Inaugural Ride didn’t let their idea crash. “It was slow going at first… but momentum built over time,” recalls Louis M. Weiner, director of Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and the MedStar Georgetown Cancer Institute.

By the time of the pre-launch festivities in October 2022, “I could feel the ‘buzz’ all around me,” Weiner added—and by the day of the BellRinger Ride, it “had transformed into a roar.”

The inaugural Ride included 851 inperson Riders, 133 Virtual Riders, and 268 volunteers. Riders embarked from Georgetown on 25-, 50-, and 100-mile routes taking them up through scenic Maryland. Together they raised $1.45 million for the important research and care taking place at Georgetown Lombardi. BellRinger is back for year two on Oct. 21, 2023. n

Photos: Courtesy of Emily Phelps, Ruba Omeira, Thu Dao, and Mohamad Almasri / elman studio

Four Georgetown students founded the Health Navigator Program to assist newly arrived refugee families.

The BellRinger Ride gets its name from the “bell ringing” milestone that cancer patients celebrate when they reach remission.

Georgetown names inaugural director of new Global Health Institute

By Lauren Wolkoff

Georgetown has appointed renowned global health scholar Deus Bazira as the inaugural director of the Global Health Institute, which is dedicated to advancing cross-disciplinary research and education on global health.

In his new role, Bazira will harness and amplify Georgetown’s strengths in global health developed over the last two decades by convening and mobilizing researchers and students for broader impact.

“We are grateful to have the leadership, expertise, and experience of one of our world’s leading global health scholars,” says Georgetown President John J. DeGioia. “Dr. Bazira joined our community in 2019 and in the years since has demonstrated a deep commitment to collaboration, an ambitious vision for how Georgetown can contribute to global health, and a deep understanding of the values that guide our mission.”

For more than 25 years, Bazira has worked to integrate scholarship with technical assistance and capacity-building for communities in emerging economies by bringing in-depth, field-level practical experience in building partnerships. An associate professor of medicine in the School of Medicine, Bazira also serves as founding director of Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Practice and Impact, which he will continue to lead.

Born in Uganda, Bazira grew up at the height of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in an environment where access to health care was a privilege, an experience that shaped his ultimate goal: strengthening the resiliency of health systems and ensuring equitable access for all to optimize individual and population health outcomes. His professional journey led him from Uganda to South Africa and then to Maryland before he settled in Washington, DC.

“Building and strengthening the global health community at Georgetown, and creating a platform that allows us to collaborate as an institution, will help elevate and amplify

our work,” Bazira says. “We will also be better positioned to undertake interdisciplinary work, to take advantage of opportunities that a faculty member, center, department, or even a school wouldn’t be able to do on their own.”

The Global Health Institute (GHI) builds on the foundation of Georgetown’s university-wide Global Health Initiative, which, for the past five years, modeled how a collective approach to global health at Georgetown could work. The work of GHI will be informed and overseen by the executive vice presidents of the Main Campus, Medical Center, and Law Center.

“This institute aims to galvanize the Georgetown global health community and foster scientific collaboration across disciplines spanning the entire research pipeline—from discovery through to implementation research and practice,” Bazira says. “Our collective success, measured in population health outcomes improvement, is what will guide our day-today work.” n

Photo: Leslie E. Kossoff

Deus Bazira, DrPH, MPH, MBA, BPharm, is the inaugural director of the Georgetown University Global Health Institute. A member of the Georgetown community since 2019, he is also an associate professor of medicine at Georgetown’s School of Medicine and serves as director of Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Practice and Impact (CGHPI).

Lecture underscores service values

By Gabrielle Barone

Continuing a tradition established in 2008 by the School of Nursing & Health Studies, this year’s Values Based Lecture for faculty and staff was hosted by the new School of Nursing and School of Health with the theme, “Reenergizing Our Values: Reflections on the Spirit of Georgetown in Our New Moment.”

According to Father Mark Bosco, S.J., vice president for Mission & Ministry, the lecture series is designed “to help faculty and staff find the language to talk about what it means to be a mission-driven health and nursing educational project in the Jesuit tradition,” Bosco says. “As we share resources, we discuss how we can expand and embody the values Georgetown lives by.”

For Sister Celeste Mokrzycki, SSJ, chaplain for the School of Health and the School of Nursing, co-hosting her first Values Based Lecture allowed her to help “present Georgetown values in a way that fit both of these schools at this time.

“When our students come here, we present the values as a difference, but how do they differentiate our experience as faculty and staff? I think it’s these values that we want to nurture in our students and interdisciplinary approaches as far as curriculum and immersion experiences,” Mokrzycki says.

The lecture also emphasized fostering inclusion and community for all, serving with respect, taking time for contemplation and reflection, and putting values into daily action.

Carol Taylor, professor of medicine and nursing, served as the lecture moderator and emphasized that bettering the community, on campus and at large, is also about giving back.

The School of Nursing and the School of Health worked together to organize a toy drive at Mary’s Center, a community health center, during the holidays and recently held a Day of Service at Food & Friends, a community

organization that delivers meals to those in need. Curriculum leaders in the schools are also developing programs for student engagement in the areas of migration and refugee health care, as well as a new Ph.D. nursing program with a health ethics and equity focus.

“The lectures provide us with an opportunity to speak with faculty and staff, the ones who will shape and form the conversations in the schools across campuses, who will shape and form the kinds of projects that we might do for both research or for teaching,” Bosco says. “It’s a really important opportunity.” n

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Father Bosco and Sister Mokrzycki run the annual Values Based Lecture for faculty and staff. They call it a “mission-driven health and educational project in the Jesuit tradition.”

Partnership expands medical humanities and health justice work

By Karen Teber

The Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice—a new collaboration between the two universities, supported by a 3.5-year, $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation—will focus on reducing health disparities in Washington, DC, by leveraging methods of critical inquiry at the heart of the humanities.

The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities examines the clinical side of medical practice within the context of the patient’s experience of health, illness, suffering, and healing. It expands health education and scholarship to encompass a broader social, cultural, and historical context. The field engages disciplines such as history, literary studies, philosophy, bioethics, psychology, medical anthropology, and the visual and performing arts.

“These approaches play a frontline role in contextualizing health care, shaping health policy and communication, allocating resources, dismantling racism and health disparities, and caring for vulnerable communities,” says Lakshmi Krishnan, founding director of Georgetown’s Medical Humanities Initiative, assistant professor of medicine at Georgetown’s School of Medicine, and co-leader of the Mellon Foundation grant with Dana Williams, dean of the Howard University Graduate School.

The new center is grounded in the needs of the Washington, DC, community. Its faculty and students will apply a medical humanities approach in addressing key health impact areas, health disparities related to race/ethnicity and income, and health care delivery, with the goal of advancing health equity in the District.

Uniquely, the center aims to transform humanities concepts —traditionally confined to the classroom—into the realm of public action.

The center also will explore curricular changes, moving away from a focus on Western medicine to engage local, global, and comparative networks of thought. This effort will support joint education in medical humanities, leveraging both universities’ strengths to offer a progressive curriculum committed to the alleviation of health care challenges and health disparities.

Scholarship will be a primary focus, as the center reinvents traditional solo humanities inquiry through a team science model that cultivates cross-institutional and community research engagement. A fellows program will allow faculty from both universities and community partners to examine the region’s most troublesome health issues. The community will benefit from access to online, open access resources and educational events showcasing the center’s work.

“Health practitioners can only treat the whole person when they are able to recognize and value humanity in its many facets,” says Krishnan, who also created and directs the Medical Humanities, Culture, and Society minor program in the College of Arts & Sciences. “There is enormous potential to improve outcomes by taking this broader view of health.” n

Photo: Unsplash.com

Cura personalis via participatory research

By Bhriana Smith

For 20 years, Roxanne Mirabal-Beltran, a Cuban American, worked in Washington, DC’s 5th Ward, first as a volunteer with the Capuchin Franciscan Volunteer Corps and later as a labor and delivery nurse at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.

One day, while waiting for her clothes to finish in a Wheaton, Maryland, laundromat, she attempted to pass the time by working on her dissertation, “Birth options after cesarean among Hispanic women living in the United States.” Unable to get much writing done, she focused her attention on her fellow patrons. At that moment Mirabal-Beltran realized she was surrounded by the very community she felt called to reach: Black and Hispanic women in urban areas.

Her work would later return to laundromats.

After completing her dissertation at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, Mirabal-Beltran joined the Georgetown University School of Nursing faculty with a plan to explore the different ways she could impact the DC community, as a researcher and practitioner.

“Communities are experts on their own needs and barriers,” she notes. “Very often, what is lacking is access to the tools needed to bring down those barriers and have needs met.”

Mirabal-Beltran began her work by attending neighborhood association meetings in the 5th Ward. After presenting her project idea to committee meetings in 2019, the community-based participatory research (CBPR) project, Wash and Spin to Health (W.A.S.H.), was born. Under Mirabal-Beltran’s purview, the program will aim to share knowledge about reproductive health to Black and His-

panic women in urban areas while the women wait between cycles of laundry.

The project is facilitated by a community advisory board (CAB) based in the 5th Ward and has since expanded to Wards 1, 4, and 7.

Mirabal-Beltran notes that CBPR projects require cultural humility.

“Being culturally competent means taking someone’s lived experiences into account,” she says.

Cultural humility forces people to humbly approach interactions with others while acknowledging personal biases and making sure those biases do not affect their ability to see the humanity of others.

“We all carry bias,” she notes. “It’s what we do about those biases that is important.”

Undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in W.A.S.H. through the Georgetown University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Students engage with the city by conducting field research, attending board meetings, and interacting with members of the communities they hope to reach.

Mirabal-Beltran notes that while many students may initially join W.A.S.H. for academic reasons, they often leave the program feeling called to be active agents of change in their local communities.

“There is this beautiful focal shift from the science to the community participants,” she notes. “Seeing this shift motivates me and reminds me why CBPR is important. n

Roxanne Mirabal-Beltran, Ph.D., R.N., started a community-based participatory research project that takes place in local laundromats. It's called Wash and Spin to Health (W.A.S.H).

Photo: Isabella Seddon

ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

Contemplation in action

By Gabrielle Barone and Heather Wilpone-Welborn

A discussion of HIV epidemiology and rates in Washington, DC, in Professor Heidi Elmendorf’s science pedagogy class at Georgetown inspired Mackenzie Copley (C’15) and David Schaffer (C’14) to serve the city’s residents. Together they founded an organization called One Tent Health to provide HIV screenings to residents in areas ranked as highly affected with HIV cases.

The two Hoyas decided to begin One Tent after graduation. Since they were both busy with other full-time responsibilities, “One Tent was founded between the hours of 11 p.m. and 3 a.m., in meetings on Skype or Zoom,” recalls Schaffer.

From 2015 to 2017, Copley and Schaffer prepared for the launch of One Tent Health, figuring out logistics like how to purchase test kits, apply for grants, and create clinical policies and contracts.

“Our launch day was really nerve-wracking for us because we had just invested two years of our lives into this project,” Schaffer says. They set their tent up next to a grocery store and it was busy right away.

When the pandemic hit, they discovered that tents were well-suited to help administer COVID-19 tests. “We said, ‘Wait a second, we have this great model where we can get patients in and out really fast,’” Schaffer says. They’ve since administered 12,000 COVID-19 tests.

In 2018, the pair presented at the U.S. Conference on HIV and AIDS, and recently presented to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Division of HIV Prevention.

The program also includes undergraduate volunteers from other local universities who can gain clinical experience—one of whom decided to go onto medical school after his time volunteering.

“It’s all about the people we’re serving,” Schaffer says, noting that he also “really liked the idea of giving students a pretty unique opportunity to engage with these communities in a hands-on

clinical space. It’s otherwise very hard to get that type of experience as a 19–20 year old.”

“Currently, we have about 100 volunteers at Georgetown,” says Makenzie Thomas (H’24), a member of their student advisory board. “One Tent Health doesn’t require a minimum time commitment, and I think this flexibility makes it easier for students to help out when they can. I kept coming back to volunteer with the organization because it helped me confirm my own aspirations towards medicine as a career and I get to learn about health care disparities from being out in the community.”

Schaffer also finds this hands-on interaction enjoyable in his own career as an emergency medicine physician.

“When it comes to these values, like cura personalis and what we learned at Georgetown, having that direct and proximal encounter with a patient is something that really motivated me every day, something I continue to find really rewarding.” n

One Tent Health was created as a way of administering HIV tests in the DC community, but the founders offered COVID-19 testing during the pandemic. Students who volunteer their time gain experience working directly with patients.

Photo: Courtesy of One Tent Health

‘Stay true to your values’

By Karen Doss Bowman

Margaret (Hayes) Jordan (N’64) made Georgetown history in 1964 as the first Black student to graduate from the School of Nursing. She went on to build a distinguished career as a health care executive, community leader, and advocate for social change in health care.

In January, Jordan received the 2022 Samuel A. Halsey Jr. Award during Georgetown’s annual Patrick Healy Dinner. The award, presented by the Georgetown University Alumni Association Black Alumni Council, is named for Georgetown’s first Black undergraduate.

“I grew up in a family with a long history of achievement, and we were very proud of it,” says Jordan, who was inspired as a young girl by the Sue Barton book series about the title character’s journey through nurse training and career. “God provided me with the intelligence and resources to pursue a career in nursing, health care administration, and community empowerment among underserved minority populations.”

A Washington, DC, native, Jordan followed her Georgetown undergraduate work with a master of public health degree in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. During her distinguished career, she served as president and CEO of Dallas Medical Resource—a community business-health care partnership to promote the region’s leadership in medical services—for more than two decades. She also served in executive roles for organizations such as

Southern California Edison, Kaiser Foundation Plan, and San Francisco General Hospital.

Jordan, who also was president and CEO of Margaret Jordan Group, LLC, served on the boards of numerous organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Hospital Association. She was a founding director of the National Black Nurses Association.

A recipient of the Georgetown School of Nursing’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, Jordan also received the 1992 Alumna of the Year Award from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. A scholarship for Georgetown nursing students is named in her honor, given annually to an African American student from Washington, DC.

Jordan believes a nursing degree provides a strong foundation for health care careers, opening up a wide range of leadership opportunities. She cherishes her Georgetown experience as an essential part of her lifelong personal and career development. “The basis of learning, the solid philosophy, and the set of principles and standards that Georgetown invokes in you carry through for the rest of your life,” says Jordan, a former director on the board of James Madison’s Montpelier Foundation. “Those attributes make all the difference in the world, especially when you must make tough decisions. You learn to stay true to your values and true to the path that God intended for you.” n

Photo: Phil Humnicky

At the 2023 Patrick Healy Dinner, President DeGioia honored Margaret (Hayes) Jordan with the Samuel A. Halsey Jr. Award. She made Georgetown history in 1964 when she became the first African American student to graduate with the BSN from the School of Nursing.

Tools of the Trade

Interview by Jane Varner Malhotra

When Andrea Spiker entered medical school, she planned to specialize in internal medicine. Orthopedics was her very last choice for third-year rotations, but then she witnessed a knee replacement surgery and knew she had found her calling.

“It was like the world turned over for me. I was enthralled by the immediacy of being able to change every component of somebody’s life, from their ability to do daily activities, to work in athletics. It was so impactful for me.”

Although there were no female faculty in the specialty when Spiker was at Georgetown, she felt very supported by her mentors. Even today among attending-level physicians in orthopedic surgery, only 6% are women.

After 20 years on the East Coast, in 2017 she returned to her hometown of Madison to become doctor for the University of Wisconsin women’s and men’s basketball teams. She sits on the bench for their games and gets inspiration from the players and coaches.

As for the tools of her trade shown above, in surgery she uses an arthroscope or joint camera, and an assortment of

power tools including saws. She often uses a model of a hip when meeting with patients. When she was a student and resident her white coat pockets were full of things, but now when she meets with patients, she doesn’t even carry a phone.

“I really focus on listening to the patient in our consultations. As a hip surgeon I have to be comprehensive because I’m ruling out adjacent structures: the back, pelvic area, and all the muscles around the hip joint and on the inside. It’s something I’ve retained from Georgetown all these years— spend time and effort to make the diagnosis, and look at the whole person.”

1. Arthroscope

2. Power tools

3. Hip model

4. Last year the teams played at the American Family Field in Milwaukee where they made the baseball field into a basketball court, and they gave her this special memento from the game. n

Andrea Spiker (M’10), Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery

Team physician for the University of Wisconsin women’s and men’s basketball teams

Photos: Andy Manis

Alumnus connects writing, medicine careers in debut book

By Gabrielle Barone

As an undergraduate at Georgetown, Ricardo Nuila (C’00) studied pre-med but majored in English.

Now, working as an internist in Houston, he’s bringing both career goals to fruition. His new nonfiction book The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine explores what the medical system is like for five patients at a Houston hospital who don’t have insurance. The book chronicles their experiences from diagnosis through treatment, and includes socio-historical background on national and local health policy.

Growing up with a physician father and attending Catholic and Jesuit schools, Nuila learned early the power of serving others, particularly while volunteering and working in countries like Brazil and India throughout his life.

“I feel like I owe so much to my education at Georgetown,” Nuila says. Conflicted about which career to pursue after he got into medical school, Nuila sought guidance from Georgetown Professor of English John Glavin following his scriptwriting course. Glavin urged Nuila to pursue medicine but not give up on writing. “He said, ‘You can go to graduate school, in writing or in English, and learn technique. But where will you get your stories from? In medicine, you will find your stories,’” Nuila recalls.

While he particularly enjoyed writing the patient narratives in his book, he found it more difficult to concisely break down and explain the complicated histories and background.

Being both a writer and a physician has been a balancing act for Nuila, first at Georgetown and later as a medical resident, when he would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to write for two hours before work. But that activity helped him process the stress and intensity of residency.

“To me, medicine and writing to me are one thing,” Nuila says. “When I’m working on my writing, I’m working on being a better doctor as well.” n

Photo: Jonas Mohr

“[Professor Glavin] said ‘You can go to graduate school, in writing or in English, and learn technique. But where will you get your stories from? In medicine, you will find your stories.’”

—Ricardo Nuila (C’00)

Reflections on Health with Srdjan Mirkovic, M.D. (M’84, Parent’20)

Orthopaedic surgeon based in Glenview, Illinois Chicago Bears and Chicago Fire Football Club spinal consultant

When I lived in Morocco as part of my mother’s yearlong work there, I went to a Jesuit Spanish school. I liked their teaching, the combination of faith and education. I think that always stayed with me, so I ended up at Georgetown. Faith and taking care of people go hand in hand

I don’t think people go into the lifelong commitment of a health care career without having some basic, solid human foundations. If I could advise the next generation of doctors, I would tell them to focus on the individual. Care about the patient. Do the right thing and don’t worry about the rest.

After playing sports in school, I always had a fascination with muscles and ligaments and tendons and broken bones, so orthopedics was kind of a natural thing for me. The spine became really interesting because if a bone is broken, if somebody has arthritis of the hip, you replace it or you treat it in the spine. But pain and psychological issues are very closely related, and I enjoy that aspect as well.

I never wanted to just focus on the spine and say, “Well, you don’t have a disc for me to operate on, so there’s nothing I can do for you.” That is not the Georgetown teaching, or my kind of faith, which is to take care of the person. A disc is just a part of it. Reassurance plays a huge part in what I do.

You have to be detailed and meticulous to take care of patients. Being a doctor is a long road, and there is a personal cost to it. There are emotional costs and psychological costs. We’re on 24 hours a day. Even when you’re not seeing a patient, you carry your patients’ problems with you all the time. So I worry about the mental health of physicians

I often think about what the human spirit can endure physically and emotionally. Then I read Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell and quite a few other books about survival, and I became fascinated by the SEALs, especially their training and Hell Week. I went to a place in San Diego called SEALFIT, run by a former SEAL commander. I also like doing marathons: the Mountain Man Memorial March in Tennessee and the Bataan Memorial Death March in White Sands, New Mexico. I want to understand and test my own level of resilience.

My wife and I went with a group to Greece on a bike and hike trip. On the hiking days, I would put some rocks in my pack and basically run for a while and wait for everybody to catch up. I’d do some squats or something, because I can’t just walk.

—Gabrielle Barone

Photos: Courtesty of Srdjan Mirkovic / iStock

Srdjan Mirkovic, M.D. (M’84), with his daughter, a member of Georgetown University Class of 2020

Who are you called to be?

Georgetown’s drive to do its best work, to help meet the world’s most profound needs, has shaped centuries of growth and progress at the university. Today, the Georgetown community is called to take on challenges more complex than ever.

Called to Be: The Campaign for Georgetown is a shared calling to expand our university’s impact in service to the common good. This $3 billion campaign focuses on four areas of great strength—and opportunity— for Georgetown:

• Ensuring our student community thrives by meeting each student’s unique needs, through scholarships and support across all dimensions of learning and formation.

• Shaping the future of teaching, research, and learning by investing in outstanding scholars and their research, and enriching students’ learning experience.

• Advancing the health and security of people and the planet by accelerating the work of students, scholars, and practitioners positioned to create a better human condition, locally and globally.

• Building a stronger, more ethical society by driving civic engagement; informing the development of thoughtful policy; and realizing our potential as the premier source of skilled public servants, business leaders, and legal and policy experts.

Learn more about the Called to Be campaign at calledtobe.georgetown.edu

Mia Jenkins, M.D. (M’23) shares her calling

Georgetown University

Office of Advancement Communications

University Box 571253

Washington, DC 20057-1253 USA

Certified nurse midwife Nafisa Jiddawi, FNP-C, WHNP-BC, CNM (NHS’14) returned to her home country to establish Tanzania’s first holistic wellness center dedicated to women’s health promotion and disease prevention: WAJAMAMA. Located in Zanzibar, the center offers maternal and child health care including an innovative model of group prenatal care pictured here, fostering a sense of community among the women. In addition, they support reproductive health and nurse-midwifery workforce development. For more about Georgetown’s nurse-midwifery program, see page 12.

Photo: Courtesty of WAJAMAMA