BME student Kelli Summers presenting
her research at this year's undergraduate symposium.
Congratulations to BME undergraduate student Kelli Summers, who has been selected as a 2011-2012 Fulbright Scholar to conduct research on Implementing a Strategy to Combat Child Pneumonia Fatalities in Ghanaian Rural Hospitals.
Kelli will leave for Malawi at the end of May to learn about conducting anthropological research and begin her Fulbright research.
She will then travel to St. Francis Xavier Hospital in Assin Foso, Ghana for her Fulbright year and will collaborate with a physician she met during a volunteer experience in 2009. She hopes to create modifications to the World Health Organization's Child Lung Health Program (CLHP) through the use of a focus group and then implement it in the Children's Ward to ultimately decrease the child mortality rate at St. Francis and provide a model for other hospitals in the area.
Her research builds upon the CLHP, which contains protocols to assess and treat childhood pneumonia in developing countries in an effort to decrease the child mortality rate. After conducting extensive literary research, Kelli believes three major problems of the CLHP prevail:
- Disconnect between the policy-makers and the hospital staff implementing the program
- Lack of cultural specificity in nurse education and expectations for patient receptiveness
- Lack of diagnostic technology - specifically pulse oximeters
Kelli has been the immediate past president of the Student Chapter of BMES, and has been involved with BMES since she was a freshman. As co-founder and co-President of UR Genocide Intervention,
Kelli helped to raise awareness, advocate to local politicians, raise money for victims, and secure scholarships for Sudanese students to come to the University of Rochester through Banaa. Additionally, Kelli has been tutoring local refugee high school and middle school kids every Saturday for the past year and a half. It's been interesting interacting with them,
said Kelli about the kids, It's incredible to see how much they've grown in such a short time.
Kelli has also been working in Professor
McGrath's Laboratory since her sophomore year conducting research under an NIH grant on Mechanisms Underlying Collective Cell Migration in Vitro.
She won the Presidential Research Award this year and is currently working on a peer-reviewed paper as the primary author to submit to the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.