In the MSTP at Stony Brook, the first-year of graduate school marks a year of academic service during which students facilitate program admissions, monthly seminars, and the annual Research Day. The GS1 service year is a “rite of passage” that gives students a sense of ownership of their program and provides each cohort an opportunity to work as a team toward developing important professional skills: organizing scientific meetings, leading seminars, and hosting a series of interdepartmental and off-campus speakers.
In particular, the MSTP Journal Clubs and Clinician Scientist Dinners (JC/CSD) are a means for GS1s to grow as student leaders by building up the community’s network of trainees and alumni, clinicians and scientists. GS1s set the agenda for these bimonthly program-wide meetings, working together with Program Co-Director Markus Seeliger to put together a series of talks that cover the broad and varied research interests and clinical specialties represented within the community.
The current GS1s have delivered an exciting and innovative JC/CSD series, notwithstanding COVID restrictions and with just six members, theirs is among the smallest classes in the program. Though the on-going pandemic precluded the traditional bi-monthly dinners and in-person socials, the GS1s have creatively made the most of the virtual format. The 2020-2021 JC/CSDs have featured diverse speakers, including many first-time guests from Stony Brook as well as outside institutions ranging from Boston Children’s and the Cleveland Clinic to the New York State Department of Health. Of the nearly twenty clinicians, scientists, and public health experts who spoke at the seminars this year, 33% were female and 40% POC, improving on five-year averages of 32% and 37%, respectively. As in previous years, some of the more prominent research topics have included cancer and internal medicine, neuro/psych, pathology — and, of course, infectious disease.
More remarkable has been the less-strictly-STEM themes that have consistently emerged in speaker presentations and student questions, such as discussions of LGBTQ health and advocacy with guest speaker Dr. Carl Streed (Boston University SOM) or a talk bearing on implicit and explicit bias in medical training and community medicine with Stony Brook’s own Dr. Jedan Phillips. In another memorable JC back in January, a three-woman panel addressed questions about the COVID vaccine, just as vaccine roll-out began to take off in the United States — a novel format for the JC. Panelist Dr. Oni Blackstone (Harlem Hospital Center) shared from her first-hand experience practicing medicine in low-income and racial minority communities where inequality-driven mistrust and vaccine hesitancy are prevalent. Several of this past year’s JC/CSDs have pushed past the strictly “professional” career paths and data plots — into the role of one’s values, politics, and identity in becoming a fully-fledged physician scientist.
By the GS1s’ own account, this is in large part by chance and in some part an apparition of the student-body zeitgeist. When asked about this trend, GS1s Camelia, Jay, and Alex expressed a mixture of surprise and gratification at the new balance of professional and personal topics covered during JC/CSDs. Camelia and Jay recalled seeing Dr. Carl Streed on a virtual diversity panel last September as part of the 35th Annual MD/PhD National Student Conference — an event that inspired them to invite Dr. Streed, originally not to a CSD but for the COVID panel. When he declined due to a prior commitment, Dr. Street referred Camelia to Dr. Oni Blackstone. Though the students had no set agenda in hosting Dr. Streed for a subsequent CSD, the questions that organically lined up in the digital Q&A queue probed into the relationship between his own open identity as a gay man and his research and practice in LGBTQ health. Perhaps there was something about the remote format of JC/CSD where, despite the alienation of virtual meetings, the glimpses we saw of each other in our homes caused something of our inner lives to bleed through the frames of the Zoom array and pour into the discussions. Jay and Alex both indicated that although they had not plotted to bring the world outside STEM into JC/CSD, they were pleased to see the uptick in community-wide conversations about the personal stories and stakes in our work as future MD/PhDs.
Though we look forward to resuming face-to-face science and seminars (with in-person free dinners), the Zoom Era of JC/CSD hardly hindered the GS1s in producing a stellar series. They have contributed both innovative approaches to MSTP seminars as well as ways of re-imagining what this space can be. We owe many thanks to Alexander Baez, Jay Gupta, Thomas Kim, Kevin Murgas, Dillon Voss, and Camelia Zheng for their efforts in sharing exciting science and keeping us connected in spite of social distance.
By Nuri Kim
