John Elue decided at age 4 that he wanted to be a doctor. Sitting at a traffic light, he was disturbed as he watched an elderly woman struggling to cross the street and declared to his mom that he wanted "to help people like her."

Elue, now 16, had a chance to explore his interest in medicine during this summer's Training Early Achievers for Careers in Health Research program, which allows students from Chicago Public Schools to be both subjects and scientific investigators.

These science-driven high school juniors already spend their summers in the Collegiate Scholars Program. They applied to spend six weeks in TEACH Research learning about medical school, shadowing doctors on clinical visits and working as data collectors on current studies at the University's Center for Health and the Social Sciences.

Last week, the students concluded the summer with an evening of poster presentations, in which they shared their research findings and fielded tough questions from parents, medical students and doctors.

"I can't believe we were able to do this. This program was a 20 out of 10," said Elue, still buzzing with excitement after the presentations. He and three other students examined which method-Palm Pilots, phone interviews or in-person visits-was the most accurate way to collect data from hospitalized patients about chronic pain. "You can't really explain love, but this program was amazing," Elue said.

TEACH Research also aims to address a larger national issue: Only 6.1 percent of physicians who graduate from allopathic medical schools are black or Hispanic. Within that tiny fraction, most focus on patient care instead of research, according to a 2006 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

For the summer program's academically advanced students, most of whom are black or Hispanic, the experience offers more reasons to include research in their medical aspirations. The students then are tracked during their undergraduate studies to see whether they continue research-related studies.

Elue said the program confirmed his passion for research and medicine.

"It was geared toward what I was there for, and let me know this is the profession I want to go into," said Elue, who maintains a 4.0 grade-point average at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School and said he wants to study medicine at Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

During the summer, TEACH Research students are divided into groups of four and randomly assigned to one of three research projects. The other two projects looked at barriers to smoking cessation and the influence of religion or spirituality on specifying an end-of-life decision maker.

The high school students work with student mentors from Pritzker School of Medicine and the University, who are also conducting research. Each team of high school students and student mentors is also assigned a faculty mentor from the medical center.

All of the projects looked at issues where "medicine draws on tools from the social sciences," explained David Meltzer, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences and Principal Investigator of the $1 million National Institutes of Health grant that funds the program. "This is not busy work. This is real research that will be used in real papers," Meltzer said.

The program started six years ago when Kim Ransom, Director of the University of Chicago's Collegiate Scholars Program, was looking for a high school program at the Medical Center, and Vineet Arora, Assistant Dean for Scholarship and Discovery at Pritzker, wanted to start one.

"Students would say, 'I want to be a doctor,' but their desires did not match their understanding of what they needed to do to realize their goals," Ransom explained. "We agreed it would be great to have a more in-depth program where students could get a much better idea of how to get from A to Z."

Mutual colleagues connected Ransom and Arora just as Meltzer discovered that the National Institutes of Health was requesting proposals for a $1 million, five-year grant for programs aimed at ushering minorities into medical research careers.

"The key is to become a researcher," said Arora, who had always had an interest in combining mentorship with medical education. "Think about health disparities. For a researcher to have a significant impact, [he or she] needs to have experience in the community; so we need to diversify the researchers we have."

Since its inception, more than 50 students have completed the program. Most of them have gone on to become pre-med students at elite universities and continue pursuing an interest in research. 

Without the program's focus on encouraging research, Stephanie Poindexter, a TEACH Research alumna, said she probably would not have included research in her plans to study medicine. "After the research project, I saw how necessary it is," said Poindexter, now a sophomore anthropology pre-med student at Washington University in St. Louis. "[With research] you can improve something, and 20 years from now, they'll be using that method."

Like many of the program's alumni, Poindexter leveraged her TEACH Research connections to land a summer job working on a clinical genetics study at the University Medical Center. "It's comforting to come back here versus some strange hospital that I've never been in. It's like coming home."

By Kadesha Thomas

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