The culminating experience (CE) projects that Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) MPH students must present to the faculty and their peers prior to graduating require a large amount of work, and a number of students end up publishing their research each year.
Leeann Kuehn is a student in the George Washington University’s three-year program combining Physician Assistant studies with earning an MPH (in Global Environmental Health, in her case, a popular combination). Kuehn has completed the public health component of her degree, and she researched how heat exposure due to climate change may impact pregnant women and their unborn children as her EOH culminating experience project. She chose to conduct the research as systematic review, a new and popular option for EOH CEs that gives students and graduates a very relevant skill for working in environmental and occupational health.
Associate Professor Sabrina McCormick was Kuehn’s CE advisor for the project, which they designed to address a sizeable gap in the literature. “New primary research is pouring in on the effects of heat exposures on birth outcomes, but there wasn’t a current literature review addressing all of the new findings. We recognized that the CE would meet that need,” Kuehn explains.
From there, Kuehn and McCormick “spent a considerable amount of time revising the work and exploring new avenues for the discussion,” Kuehn says. She presented her CE project to the department in April, but the two did not have their manuscript ready to submit for potential publication until summertime.
The submission process took about six weeks, including two rounds of peer review and edits. Two weeks after McCormick and Kuehn learned that the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) had accepted their research for publication, they were informed that it was selected as the publication’s cover article for August 2017.
The publication also ran a short cover story about the research and its implications. Media including The Atlantic and the Hindustan Times published stories about the research, too.
“The first thing that comes to mind when we think of climate change isn’t necessarily how it impacts our health. As a future clinician, I am excited to have the opportunity to keep the human health impacts of climate change in mind when caring for my patients. The systematic review I completed with Dr. McCormick as my CE gives clinicians and public health researchers a better idea as to what needs to be done to protect patients and the general public alike from the very real threat of excess heat exposure.”
For Kuehn, “the CE experience was an invaluable opportunity to see what it takes to publish a paper, from developing the research question to approving the final revision before publication,” and she says that the “extra effort was worth it.” Kuehn is currently finishing her first year of the Physician Assistant program. She will enter clinical rotations this May and is on track to receive her joint Physician Assistant and Public Health degrees in May 2019.