The University of Washington’s Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center’s (HIPRC) 2023 INSIGHT Summer Research Program Symposium spotlighted a range of injury and violence prevention research conducted by interns. Joined virtually and in-person by family, friends, mentors, researchers, and the public, the two-day symposium was the first in-person symposium since 2019. Seventeen interns, from across the country and globe, presented their research findings and experiences from the program at the Symposium.
Keynote speaker Bonnie Duran, DrPH, Professor Emeritus, UW School of Social Work and Public Health, spoke about her life’s career in medicine and highlighted how mindfulness is a resource we all can use to help get through life’s challenges. “According to Shinzen Young, when you practice mindfulness, you cultivate three core skills,” said Dr. Duran. “The three skills include: Concentration is the ability to focus and stabilize one’s attention. Clarity is the ability to keep track of the components of sensory experience as they arise in various combinations, moment-by-moment. Equanimity is the ability to ‘be with’ experience with an attitude of gentle matter-of-factness,” said Dr. Duran. Her talk emphasized how important it is to take care of our internal and mental happiness through mindfulness.
Following the keynote, the INSIGHT undergraduate, graduate, and medical student interns presented their research findings that ranged from topics including older adult falls, traumatic brain injury (TBI) prevention, firearm injury prevention, community violence, drowning prevention, and much more. Four students also received INSIGHT Academic Distinction awards:
A new addition to the undergraduate curriculum was a joint activity with the INSIGHT High School Program. Both INSIGHT Programs joined forced to learn about evidence-based drowning prevention strategies and public health communications. Collectively groups of students from both programs worked together to develop a drowning prevention campaign for adolescents, which included creating social media graphics and tweets.
Project mentors for the 2023 Program include: Abhijit Lele, MBBS, MD, MS; Alexander Skokan, MD; Angelique Day, PhD, MSW; Arjun Bhalla, PhD; Isabell Sakamoto, MS, CHES; Janessa Graves, PhD, MPH; John Hess, MD, MPH; Judith Hagedorn, MD; Katie Wolff, PhD, MSHP; Keith Hullenaar, PhD, MS; Kushang Patel, PhD, MPH; Linda Quan, MD; Lynn Stansbury, MD, MPH, MFA, FACP; Paul Neuville, MD; Vern Harner, PhD, MSW.
Career Mentors for the 2023 Program include: Benjamin Wilfond, MD: Director, Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Professor, Divisions of Bioethics and Palliative Care and Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine, Department of Pediatrics; Mariel Torres Mehdipour, MPH: Deputy Equity Officer of Public Health, Seattle and King County; Nicole Gibran, MD, FACS: Professor, Department of Surgery and Trauma & Burn, and David and Nancy Auth Washington Research Foundation Endowed Chair for Restorative Burn Surgery.
Sponsors for the 2023 Program include: The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); UW Medicine; Harborview Medical Center; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); UW Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine, and Seattle Children’s.
A complete overview of this year’s projects and program is available at the INSIGHT website. Applications for the 2024 program will open in the fall.
INSIGHT Alumni: Please share your recent academic or professional accomplishments with us! We feature alumni news in the alumni newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter and don’t miss any updates, highlights, and volunteer opportunities! INSIGHT Alumni are encouraged to join the HIPRC INSIGHT Alumni Facebook group as well. For access contact, insightalumni@gmail.com or injuryed@uw.edu.
The primary goal of the INSIGHT Research Program is to develop the next generation of injury researchers.
