Research, the fine arts, winemaking, public health work, pageant competition: Students bring a wide range of interests and perspectives to DMU in part because of what they did before enrolling. Meet some who pursued other paths on their way to the University.
Kiley Gallagher, PA’23, pursued her scientific interests in a field about 8,000 years older than medicine: As an undergraduate at California Polytechnic State University, she majored in wine and viticulture with a concentration in oenology, the science of winemaking.
“It’s like getting a degree in biochemistry, but it also has a creative side in the tasting, blending, marketing and label design,” she says. After graduating, she worked in the wine industry, performing chemical analysis. After about five years, she wanted to advance her scientific career but had concerns she was too old to go back to school. Then her mother was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, a rare form of cancer that took her life in 2019.
“She always talked about going to nursing school, and she would have been an excellent nurse. When I started talking to her about going into medicine, she was all for it,” Gallagher says. “Her diagnosis was a wake-up call that life is short, and it wouldn’t matter if I were in my 30s when I got into practice. Mom somehow pushed me on to the right track.”
Gallagher still enjoys an occasional glass of the good stuff. She offers a tip to those of like tastes: Check out the Vivino app, which allows users to scan a wine label or a restaurant wine list to see reviews and prices, to leave a review and get suggestions for other wines.
“I also tend to go for wines with the fewest bottles on the shelf, because that means people are buying them,” she says.
Growing up, Lydia Sohn had a “master plan” – to perform as a member of a professional orchestra and then become a physician. She eventually realized “those are two long professional paths,” she says. But her dual interests in music and science put her on yet another path: She was crowned Miss Maryland in 2021 and participated that December in the Miss America competition.
Sohn already had earned her bachelor’s degree in molecular and cellular biology, with a music minor, from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. She’s now a first-year student in DMU’s osteopathic medicine program and an ensign in the U.S. Navy with a goal of becoming a Navy doctor. Why, you might ask, would she care to compete for the Miss America title?
“People are often confused about why I chose that,” she says. “But it’s a scholarship program, and there isn’t a swimsuit competition; they got rid of that. And there’s nothing wrong with being feminine.”
Sohn enjoyed the camaraderie and support of the women in the competition, the opportunity to promote art therapy as her social impact initiative and the “surreal” experience of being on stage.
“On stage, you don’t know what question you’re going to be asked, so it’s all thinking on your feet. It’s like taking an exam,” she says.
Her brother, Joshua, a Navy physician, sparked her interest in military service and her application to DMU. In his medical residency, he worked with Tony Le, D.O.’17, whom Joshua described to his sister as the “best doctor he’d ever worked with.” Le, a family medicine physician in the Navy based in Okinawa, Japan, says he introduced Joshua to osteopathic manual medicine as an “extra modality” D.O.s can offer patients.
“That resonated with me,” Sohn says. “I like that DMU cares about students and takes a holistic approach to health care.”
Before he enrolled in DMU’s osteopathic medicine program, second-year student Pruthvi Kilaru, M.P.H., helped mitigate spread of the coronavirus. As a student in Syracuse University’s master of public health program, he planned to focus his master’s thesis on adverse childhood experiences. Then COVID-19 erupted, causing clinic closures; however, the pandemic opened another door: David Larsen, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor of public health, invited him to join his research, which led to Kilaru overseeing the campus wastewater surveillance program – an early alert system that monitored for traces of the virus in residence halls – and managing operations of the COVID-19 testing center in the university’s stadium.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the center, and several universities contacted Kilaru for information. The research team eventually coordinated with the New York Department of Health to create a wastewater surveillance system that grew to test for COVID in at least one wastewater treatment plant in 60 counties, covering a population of more than 15 million. Their work was published Oct. 13, 2022, in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“We got to the point where we could predict spikes in cases two weeks before they happened,” says Kilaru.
He also designed and built a composite sampler, needed for wastewater testing, from materials he purchased at a hardware store. Because commercial composite samplers were hard to get due to supply chain issues and high demand, he and Larsen posted the design on the online platform Engineering Archive so that organizations and communities could make their own.
“People were using the design and making it better,” Kilaru says. “The work I had done made a genuine impact. That’s what I was looking for.”
Astronauts may be able to travel to Mars more safely thanks in part to Quiana McKnight.
As a freshman at Langston University, the now-first-year podiatric medical student was invited by her biology professor, Byron Quinn, Ph.D., to join the research he was doing with a grant though NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project Institutional Research Opportunity. McKnight’s research occurred within the Langston University NASA Advanced Research in Biology Center, or LUNAR-BC, a collaboration of scientists working to develop natural measures to counter the immune dysregulation astronauts may experience after extended space flight missions.
“If we want to go to Mars, that’s a three-year commitment – a year to get there, a year for the mission and a year to get back. There’s no turning around quickly,” McKnight says. “What can we give to astronauts to help their bodies fight infection and illness naturally?”
Her investigations twice took her to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she worked with and presented to other researchers. “Those experiences definitely tested my critical thinking skills and helped me with my public speaking. They got me out of my shell,” she says.
Her internship extended a year after she graduated from Langston. After that she needed clinical experience toward her end goal, to become a family medicine physician. The COVID-19 pandemic limited those opportunities, though, so she became a receptionist and then was promoted to a scribe at a private podiatric practice. That changed her goal.
“I liked that the physicians could do surgery, and they enjoyed close relationships with their patients,” she says.
Michaela Harrington began dancing when she was four; by the sixth grade, she was commuting three hours round trip from Stillwater, OK, her hometown, to Tulsa, to train at the Tulsa Ballet Center for Dance Education, a routine she maintained for seven years.
“I would take a bus there and then drive back at night with my dad, who would be commuting back home from work,” she says. “It certainly made for long days, but it was worth it. I had to be very time-efficient. That’s helping me now.”
Currently a first-year student in DMU’s osteopathic medicine program, she continued to dance while earning dual degrees, magna cum laude, in dance performance, neuroscience and cognitive science from the University of Arizona. In 2019, she landed a position with the Philadelphia-based Koresh Dance Company, known for its technically superb dancers and vast repertoire. She was among 140 women who tried out for one position with the company.
“That was a surprise. Koresh was the company I thought I’d have the least chance of getting,” she says.
When the pandemic put the company’s touring schedule “in limbo land,” Harrington focused on her longtime Plan B of becoming a physician. She taught dance to youth, scribed for a children’s hospital in Philadelphia and began applying to medical schools. DMU accepted her and approved a deferral year so she could continue performing with Koresh.
“That was a sign people here appreciated me for who I am and what is important to me,” she says. “I was fortunate to have another year of dance. There’s something so intrinsically gratifying about it, and it’s exhilarating being on stage.”
