Helping medical students chase passion projects

For clinicians and health researchers, getting published in medical journals help enhance their cachet in the industry. Medical journals, after all, serve as a conduit for sharing scientific findings to the public and being able to contribute to the body of knowledge can certainly increase one’s reputation, more so if one is still a medical student. Veincent Christian F. Pepito, a faculty member at the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health, is helping medical students pursue their passion projects.

 

“I always tell my students to do their best in their research and come up with a publishable study. Publications are important and they can give you a foot in the door,” he says.  He should know: Pepito is part of a group of researchers who mapped out global child mortality patterns and clusters. The study is part of the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), a global collaboration of researchers that analyzes the mortality and disease burden from major diseases and risk factors.  The study has been published in Nature, a leading international weekly journal of science.
 

 

Pepito was invited by another Ateneo faculty member, Dr. John Wong to collaborate on the project.

 

“It was through Dr. Wong that I got involved in the project,” he says. Pepito is one of the Filipino researchers who helped address discrepancies between global estimates and reality. There are instances, he notes, wherein projections from models may not reflect the reality on the ground. Pepito’s main responsibility was to look for these incongruities and suggest methodological refinements and/or other data sources, thus ensuring that estimates are realistic and accurate. With his background in epidemiology and quantitative research. Pepito was more than equipped to handle the task. Today, he is sharing his knowledge to ASMPH students.

 

“I teach research methods to YL5 to YL7. Last year, it was YL5 and YL6.” As part of the school curriculum, students are taught Research and Epidemiology. They learn everything about research, from topic development and writing a review of literature to methodology, research implementation and analysis. The students’ outputs are displayed during Research Week.

 

Pepito uses this opportunity to help students become engaged with issues they personally care about. This year, he is mentoring students who are working on topics as diverse as menopause, complementary and alternative medicine, support groups, and the Doctors to the Barrios program. Created by the Department of Health in the early 90s, the program aims to address the lack of physicians in rural areas by deploying doctors to work in these geographically isolated areas. Several ASMPH graduates have gone on to join the program.

 

It bodes well that ASMPH is a very liberal research community. “The school does not impose on what students could and could not explore.”

 

Recognizing the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration in discovering innovative solutions for critical health issues, the School has invested in a center for research and innovation. Established in 2017, the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health Center for Research and Innovation (ACRI) is the research arm of the school. It strives to pursue and discover knowledge and apply it in communities. ACRI provides an open and collaborative platform for research, support and capacity building in the following research areas: service delivery network in population-based healthcare, mental health, child health and neurodevelopmental disabilities, environmental health, and information technology in health.

 

Pepito is also a part of ACRI.

To know more about ASMPH, visit https://www.ateneo.edu/aps/asmph.