Opportunity Knocks at Cook County Hospital: Spotlight on Samantha Hernandez

Each week, dozens of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) spend their free time conducting clinical research in the emergency department at Cook County Hospital (CCH). As part of the hospital’s Academic Associate program, these dedicated premedical students are given the opportunity to contribute to clinical research projects in the emergency department under the guidance of expert physicians and medical staff. Several students from the UIC Honors College, Guaranteed Professional Program Admissions (GPPA), and Las Ganas programs have taken advantage of this valuable experience, including Honors College student Samantha Hernandez.

For the past two and a half years, Hernandez has been working on clinical research studies at CCH through the Academic Associate program. After a group interview process, she joined the second ever cohort of the program and has since contributed to multiple projects focused on improving patient care. Collaborating with the trauma team and the emergency department as a whole, Hernandez has most recently been researching the effect of lidocaine on lower back pain. In this study, patients are randomly assigned either a placebo or a treatment plan of 5% lidocaine patches. After one and four weeks, student researchers like Hernandez follow up with these patients to determine their levels of pain and discomfort. The preliminary results of this project demonstrated that the lidocaine patches were not very effective, so continuing studies will focus on building upon the currently small sample size of forty patients by including spanish speaking patients in the future. In April 2019, Hernandez presented her work on the CCH lidocaine study at UIC’s annual Impact and Research Day, an event in which university students engaged in research and other academic pursuits can share their experiences with faculty and peers.

Beyond basic exposure to clinical research, the Academic Associate program has other far-reaching benefits for its students. Premedical students in the program are also given valuable clinical and shadowing experiences with physicians in the emergency department. As a first generation college student, Samantha Hernandez, for example, had only a vague understanding of scientific research before college and did not think she would ever have “the opportunity to talk to physicians and patients.”After joining the Academic Associate program, Hernandez now spends 12+ hours a week on research as an undergraduate, and as a result, has learned how to analyze patient charts and data and talk directly to physicians about their prescription plans for patients. Hernandez has also gained confidence in herself after realizing that it is “really fruitful to see how well my projects do and impact the patient population.” She also finds the project to be a “constant eye-opener” because of the large amount of work she does with the underserved populations of Chicago. Due to her extensive involvement in the program, Hernandez is now the Assistant Program Coordinator for Research, a role that gives her the opportunity to actively develop new projects and protocols for the emergency department’s studies. As a result of her experiences in the Academic Associate program, Samantha Hernandez plans to remain actively involved and find even more clinical research opportunities even as she applies to medical school after graduating this semester.