On April 20, 2023, the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences (DFMPHS) held its Annual Research Day. Reseach Day was a successful event for the sixth year in a row with a total of 58 attendees joining our virtual half-day meeting! 

This year’s event was centered on the National Public Health Week theme for 2023: “Centering and Celebrating Cultures in Health.” This year’s keynote speaker was Dr. Hayley S. Thompson, PhD. Dr. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Oncology at Wayne State University and the inaugural Associate Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Karmanos Cancer Institute (KCI), an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center. Dr. Thompson’s talk explored her research on racial and ethnic disparities in cancer care and outcomes. She also highlighted her influential work on medical mistrust, including her leadership in developing the Group-Based Medical Mistrust Scale (GBMMS), which has been administered in over 100 published peer-reviewed studies.

Dr. Thompson’s talk was followed by the 2023 student/trainee “top abstract” awardees. Family Medicine Resident Awardee Dr. Mariam Japaridze, MD presented “Empowering Medical Assistants to Identify and Respond to Abnormal Vital Signs: An Educational Intervention,” and this work was mentored by DFMPHS faculty member, Dr. Elizabeth Towner. MPH Student Awardee, Zahra Dawson, presented “Supporting Patient-Provider Collaboration on Long-COVID through Adaptation of Healthlink Model for Building Capacity in Patient Centered Outcomes Research.” Zahra’s research was mentored by several DFMPHS faculty: Drs. Elizabeth Towner, Rachel Mahas, Victoria Neale, and Jinping Xu. This year introduced a third award category for medical students, and was won by Emma Streveler who presented “Longitudinal Quality of Life of Men with Low-Risk Prostate Cancer in the Population-Based Treatment Options for Prostate Cancer Study (TOPCS).” This project was mentored by two DFMPHS faculty: Drs. James Janisse and Jinping Xu, as well as Drs. Cathryn Bock (WSU Oncology) and Michael Goodman (Emory University). A warm congratulations to the awardees and all of our other students, trainees, research staff, and faculty who provided an engaging series of presentations.

Please visit the DFMPHS Research Day event page to view the virtual meeting content (https://familymedicine.med.wayne.edu/researchday2023).

A very special thanks to this year’s planning committee co-led by Drs. Rachel Mahas and Erin Fanning Madden, and strongly supported by Elizabeth Towner, Amanda Compton, Youcheng Liu, and Julie Gleason-Comstock.

Please mark your calendars for next year’s Research Day event on April 18, 2024.