Summer Research Fellowships Building on the knowledge gained during the first year of medical school, many students conduct research over the summer at prestigious institutions throughout the country. Research topics include investigating the relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular health and researching substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. Participating students receive a stipend for the eight-week research experience.
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www.quinnipiac.edu/medicine/fellowships
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extremity from 2007–14. The goal of this surgery is to restore blood flow to the legs of patients suffering from critical limb ischemia, which causes symptoms such as non-healing ulcers, foot gangrene and claudication (leg pain caused by poor circulation). Previous research consistently found racial disparities, which some in the medical community theorized may occur because black patients do not receive treatment early enough to address the disease and/or may have less access to health care. The researchers at Johns Hopkins speculated that strict management of comorbidities for all patients may have helped close the disparity gap in this case. “I had a great time participating in this study, and I would like to conduct more clinical research during my career,” said Massada. “It’s a way for physicians to assess the efficacy of their current methods and develop new ideas to improve health care delivery.”
Karen Massada, Class of 2017, spent the summer after her first year of medical school investigating racial disparities in patients who received lower-limb bypass surgery at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research findings were encouraging: she found no variations in outcomes for these patients.
Massada, who moved to the U.S. from Togo nine years ago, also hopes to participate in mission trips to her home country and work abroad with Doctors Without Borders. She is interested in vascular surgery, which includes the management of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high cholesterol, that are prevalent in populations she would like to serve.
Massada worked at Johns Hopkins for her summer research project. She partnered with the physicians and clinical research fellows there to comb through the data collected from all of the patients who had bypass surgery for a lower
“I hope to see the results obtained at Hopkins repeated at other medical centers,” she added, “because the outcomes of surgeries for African-Americans and Caucasians should always be the same.”
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