“They make me love the work even more than I do already because I see it through their eyes.”

That isn’t the only research that carries real-world medical and scientific benefits that the TouroCOM Middletown students turn their research skills to, boasts their professor and mentor. Take Vitamin C, as just one example: “The popular belief is that Vitamin C is critically beneficial to our organism, and we are treating it as a supplement in the form of candy,” she says. “But take too much, say three to five times the daily recommended dose, and the research actually shows it reduces the beneficial interaction with hemoglobin, which is the protein inside red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to tissues and organs in the body.”

The students also work on researching and writing study findings for publications. “The Touro students are smart, and they have an enthusiasm to work toward making changes in today’s medicine, as well as improving and bringing innovations to medical treatments,” says Wollocko, a wife, mother and grandmother. “For example, in all the work we do, the oxygencarrying capacity of hemoglobin could give us breakthrough treatments in diseases that blood transfusions aren’t applied to, such as sickle cell anemia. The students want to know everything about everything. They make me love the work even more than I do already because I see it through their eyes.”

Wollocko says many of her students want to be physicians who both see patients and do research. “As a researcher, as a doctor, as a teacher,” she says, “I could not ask for more.”