How will your presentation and participation at the CMSC Annual Meeting assist you pursuing your chosen career path?

I am now more strongly considering Neurology or Pediatric Neurology as a specialty.  Through the meeting, I expanded my appreciation of the multi-faceted nature of multiple sclerosis and have deepened my interest in the disease and patients affected by it.

What were the most valuable learning experiences related to MS derived from your research project experience?

I was able to personally interview eight MS patients.  I learned a great deal about their disease as well as their experience with bariatric surgery.  These patients gave the disease a more personal face for me such that I feel that I better understand MS patients and the struggle that can go along with having a chronic disease.  I think that this experience will make me a more empathetic health care provider in the future.

Please describe the sessions or activities of most professional value to you during the CMSC Annual Meeting.

The variety of topics related to MS in the sessions provided breadth in knowledge related to MS.  Many of the talks were on the latest topics in MS and it is very exciting to learn and hear the different perspectives from leading experts in the field.  There were opportunities to meet and network with various health care providers and researchers around the continent who provide MS care.

How will your presentation and participation at the CMSC Annual Meeting assist you pursuing your chosen career path?

My presentation and participation at the CMSC Annual Meeting was a very positive experience and is guiding me in considering a MS related health care field for my future career path.  I'm inspired from talking to different MS care providers and students in various stages of training.

What were the most valuable learning experiences related to MS derived from your research project experience?

The research project introduced the field of MS and allowed me to meet and work with leading experts in the field and other motivated students.  I appreciated the opportunity to learn and review MRI's of MS patients with one of the world's leading diagnostic radiologist and the opportunity to learn and conduct MS research in a province wide MS clinic.  It was a privilege to review the MRI of all NMO and OSMS patients in British Columbia in the last two decades.  I learned and gained exposure to the various disciplines that are necessary in providing MS care.   During my research project I was able to have exposure to various patients with MS, gain an appreciation of the complexity and diversity of the disease and the opportunity to observe the expert provision of MS care by various physicians in a large MS care center.

Please describe the sessions or activities of most professional value to you during the CMSC Annual Meeting.

As a student, I saw it as a great opportunity to learn more about the different facets of MS and how we should approach patients.  The poster session was also of immense value, allowing me to see the current progress of research concerning MS.

How will your presentation and participation at the CMSC Annual Meeting assist you pursuing your chosen career path?

Attending allowed me to network and meet clinicians of various specialties, opening up a new avenue to get advice about the career choices I make.

What were the most valuable learning experiences related to MS derived from your research project experience?

One of the most valuable, and humbling, experiences I had conducting this research is how much effort everyone -- nurses, clinicians, researchers -- is putting forward to progress our care of patients but knowing that there is still much to be done.  My work looked at MS from only one angle, but it made me realize that there are innumerable ways in which we can study this disease.

Please describe the sessions or activities of most professional value to you during the CMSC Annual Meeting.

The luncheon was good for me professionally because it gave me a chance to meet professionals in the field of neurology and network.  I obtained contact information from several MS fellows and residents and hopefully can meet up with them again if I interview at their programs.

How will your presentation and participation at the CMSC Annual Meeting assist you pursuing your chosen career path?

I want to be a neurologist, and my participation at the annual meeting helped me pursue my career path by letting me experience a neurology national conference, network with other neurologists, and get research/presentation experience that will help me with my future career as a physician.

What were the most valuable learning experiences related to MS derived from your research project experience?

I think the most valuable experience related to MS was getting to work closely with patients that I studied.  They are all wonderful people who are extremely interested in learning about their disease and ways they can tackle the problems they face in everyday life.  Having the chance to educate them is such a great learning experience for me.

What aspect of this summer project was most valuable to you?

I think the most important and valuable part of this project was witnessing all of the hard work and dedication in a lab that goes into biomedical research and subsequently publishing those findings. I can now go into my future career as a clinician better understanding both the research and clinical side of medical problems.

I knew that multiple sclerosis was an autoimmune disease, but I had no idea how focused on immunology much of the MS research is. I learned a great deal about the details of immunology that I only briefly touched on in medical school, particularly the different cytokines and their effects in autoimmunity.

How will this scholarship be of value to you in your future training and career development?

I am very interested in the field of neurology and if I do become a neurologist, I will have a great understanding of the direction that MS research is heading in. I also will have learned how to perform some basic research techniques and appreciated how much animals are to biomedical research. As a result of this scholarship project, I will be a more well-rounded physician, with research experience to add to my clinical experience as well.

What aspect of this summer project was most valuable to you?

The most valuable part of my summer research was gaining an understanding of how important research is in medicine, and especially in the fight against MS. I learned that MS research is in its early years and great contributions are still to come. It is hard to believe that for such a prevalent disease much of it remains a mystery. My area of research was imaging, specifically to see if a specific MRI sequence could pick up cortical lesions of the brain. It’s hard to think that 25 years ago the only way to see a lesion was on autopsy and now a quick scan can provide enough detail to clearly visualize the cortex of the brain. It was insightful to see the interrelationship between research and clinical medicine and see how the two can be fused into a single career.

What, if anything, did you learn about multiple sclerosis that you had not anticipated before taking on this project?

Before taking on this project I had no firsthand knowledge of MS. What I looked forward to most was meeting with MS patients during clinic and learning about their specific form of the disease. I was surprised by the heterogeneity of MS, specifically the different patterns of progression. I had believed MS was a disease where in time disability was imminent, but there were patients afflicted for many decades who showed mild to no impairment. It was heartening to meet patients who could not recall the exact year of their last attack because it was so far in the past.

How will this scholarship be of value to you in your future training and career development?

This scholarship allowed me to spend the summer learning about the research and clinical aspects of MS. I became familiar with magnetic resonance imaging (literally from the inside out after volunteering as a control subject!) and neurology which will be helpful in future training and endeavors. Before this experience, I had only a vague idea about the field of neurology and had not seriously considered it as a career path. I now look forward to my neurology rotation with great enthusiasm.

Project Mentor Feedback
Jerry Wolinsky, MD
Stephanie had the opportunity to join the other premedical and medical students in our NIH sponsored program for summer students that includes a number of broadly ranging lectures by leading researchers and clinician-investigators at our institution as a means of enriching and supplementing her experience in our laboratory. Her experience in the laboratory allowed her to integrate her lectures from the first year in neuroanatomy with clinically relevant issues in imaging patients with MS. While her project produced mainly negative data (we did not overlook intracortical plaques by double-inversion recovery done in the past at 1.5 T that we can now recognize at 3T), it did allow her to learn a lot about hypothesis testing clinical research. She will present her results tomorrow at the 2008 RESEARCH FORUM & C. FRANK WEBBER PRIZE FOR STUDENT RESEARCH COMPETITION, and is looking forward to submitting the work to the CMSC Atlanta meeting next year.

Dr. Li: Henry Tran is a first year medical student and it is great to be able to get a young mind who is enthusiastic involved in MS research. For him, he is involved in engineering so he was very much interested in trying to put together his engineering, computer science skills and adapt it to try to do fancy image processing. So it was exciting for him to start really not knowing very much about MS and what you can see on MS images, and then apply these techniques and be excited about getting involved in MS research. So it was really gratifying and I think he has done some good work. And I think he is thrilled.

Dr. Traboulsee: He is. He wants to submit the work he has done. He was very successful this summer the work he did to the American Academy of Neurology which is going to be in Seattle so that's close by for us. And hopefully he will submit this to the Consortium meeting as well.

The Scholarship program was a big success. These students don't really have choices for source of funding to pursue these things.
Otherwise they might do another job to try to make ends meet because medical school has gotten so expensive and these kids are graduating with enormous debt. So having the scholarship available to get them involved in MS and also to take off some of that burden is just enormously helpful.

We also had a second student as well. Mandeep Mann, who did a project on South Asian Multiple Sclerosis, looking at the incidence and prevalence of MS in the South Asian population. Again, that was a very successful project.

Dr. Li: I think the other thing is really to getting these young people interested very early on in their career because they have so many choices in terms of what they can do, to get them excited about the disease, get them excited about the potential for research and to get them excited about how they can combine fields. For Henry, for example, his background in engineering and computer science, medicine and MS and how we can put that together in the future. It's great to be able to perhaps influence student’s decisions about what they want to do in the future.

What aspect of this summer project was most valuable to you?

The most valuable aspect of the summer project was meeting with the research team to put together a poster presentation that organized some of the preliminary findings of our study. We were then able to present this poster at a residency fair, and discuss these findings with neurologists and others interested in multiple sclerosis research.

What, if anything, did you learn about multiple sclerosis that you had not anticipate before taking on this project?

I have gained more appreciation for the complexity of multiple sclerosis, and the difficulty the disease presents from a treatment standpoint. Even with advanced imaging technology, it is difficult to quantify the response to treatment and determine the exact significance of individual lesions in the nervous system.