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UNC School of Medicine students had the opportunity to showcase their research work at the annual Student Research Day, sponsored by the John B. Graham Medical Student Research Society.


The John B. Graham Student Research Society held annual Student Research Day on Oct. 29. The day kicked off with the Landes Merrimon Lecture, delivered this year by Dr. Richard Frank, Professor of Health Economics at Harvard University.

Following Frank’s lecture, several students gave oral presentations detailing their research projects. Then, things moved to the UNC Medical Center lobby for the poster presentation portion of the day. Students lined the halls discussing their work with faculty, staff, and passersby.

We chatted with a few students about their projects and their research experiences.

Our project looked at the efficiency of communication between neurosurgery and anesthesiologists.

We wanted to look at the most common delays to surgery and we did that by administering a questionnaire to neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists.

We then recorded whether or not the amount of delays changed after a communications checklist was introduced. And we were able to reduce delays by 64 percent after introducing this checklist.

– Deen Garba

I did my project as a part of the Carolina Summer Medical Research Program. We were studying the correlation between public assistance and instances of sudden unexpected death.

First we wanted to establish that census tracks with a high level of poverty had a higher incidence of sudden death. That was indeed the case. And then we wanted to see if these social programs could make an impact and lower the number of sudden deaths. We unfortunately did not find that. Basically, our conclusion is that these social programs are not enough to level the playing field.

– Danielle Davari

“We were looking at trends in GI’s top impact factor journals, and one thing in particular we were looking at was female authorship. We looked at original, full length manuscripts from 1997, 2007, and 2017 in three of the top impact journals in GI.

By 2017, 43 percent of first authors were female. Which is great. But that’s sort of counteracted by the fact that female senior authorship was less frequent than female first authorship and male last authorship.”

– Shweta Bhatia

“We aimed to develop an elder abuse screening tool that was short and could be administered in the emergency department, cover multiple domains of elder abuse and optimize predictive accuracy. We also wanted to incorporate a cognitive assessment as part of the tool.

We tested it here at UNC with 259 patients, and it now will be further tested as part of a multisite validation study.”

– Joseph Dayaa

Several students were recognized with awards for their projects. Award winners:

Pillsbury Awards

Poster Presentations:

Basic Science:Mauricio Barreto

Clinical Science: Janine Baldino and Josh Ellis

Public Health: Clark Howell

Oral Presentations:

Basic Science: Serna Lian

Clinical Science: Halei Benefield

Public Health: Camille Morgan

Kuno Award for Public Health Research: Allie Harbert

Scott Neil Schwirck Fellowships:

Courtney Vaughn and Yingao Zhang