December 21, 2022 | Volume IV, Issue 25

Season of Giving: Alum Kelly McQueen, M.D.’91, Fosters Global Service Careers

Growing up, Kelly McQueen, M.D., a Larner College of Medicine Class of 1991 medical alum, traveled frequently with her parents, gaining exposure “to the needs of people around the world,” she said. Those experiences helped inform her decision to attend medical school.

While no global health program existed at UVM when McQueen arrived in 1987, she articulated her interest widely. Her pediatrics professor and mentor, the late Jerold Lucey, M.D., answered the call. “Jerry sent me to a Catholic mission in San José de Ocoa, Dominican Republic,” recalls McQueen. “The priest, Father Lou, wasn’t a doctor, but we’d pack the pickup and go up to the campos in the hills — the very poorest areas — and give vaccinations and plant trees. When I got back, I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do with my life.’”

The 2016 recipient of the Larner Medical Alumni Association’s Service to Medicine and Community Award, McQueen is the Ralph M. Waters Distinguished Chair in Anesthesiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and a leader in global anesthesia and surgery communities. Her medical career has been a hybrid of U.S.-based academic medicine and global health, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Her contributions have evolved from patient care to building infrastructure and expertise among village clinicians and caregivers, to research on global anesthesia, unmet surgical needs, and workforce crises in low-income countries.

Recently, she established the Kelly McQueen, M.D.’91, Endowment for Global Health Education to support international clinical rotations for Larner medical students and the Global Health Program curriculum, with a goal “to encourage interested students to explore global health as a potential career path and provide resources that will allow them to focus on the needs of the people they are serving rather than on how they’re going to manage financially.”

Read the full article about McQueen and her philanthropic gift.

Pictured above: Kelly McQueen, M.D. 

Finette’s THINKMD Tool Brings Needed Clinical Expertise to Remote Populations

The shortage of health care workers seen in the U.S. is even greater in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where physicians are scarce and many community health workers lack the necessary training and skills to provide accurate assessments of patients’ health risks. 

University of Vermont Professor of Pediatrics Barry Finette, M.D., Ph.D., witnessed this problem firsthand when providing health care in low- and middle-income nations. Eager to find a solution, he partnered with Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus Barry Heath, M.D., with whom he developed and tested a mobile digital application designed to bring physician-based knowledge to the hands of minimally skilled health workers. In 2014, the duo founded THINKMD™.

The THINKMD app can be used anywhere — online or offline — where there is a shortage of health care professionals. It “allows the end user to perform a high-quality clinical evaluation of a patient and create appropriate care arrangements,” explains Finette. To date, the technology has been used in 11 countries, impacted a population of nearly 20 million people, and assessed roughly 300 clinical diseases and condition risks.

In the fall of 2021, THINKMD received a $2.5 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant that focuses on upgrading and standardizing the technology’s clinical analytical tools/risk assessments, performing patient evaluations, and supporting interoperability between different systems. 

More recently, THINKMD received a $1.5 million USAID Development in Innovations grant to perform a randomized controlled clinical trial in Nigeria to test the technology at a higher scale and determine its ability to scale it at a nationwide or global level using a sustainable financial model. 

“Currently, there is an exponential increase in the shortage of health care providers globally,” says Finette. “You cannot replace these physicians by training more, due to a lack of educational infrastructure or facilities. To meet the needs, technology can help build a health care workforce that can develop knowledge.”

Read the full article about THINKMD.

Pictured above: A health care worker in Bangladesh (right) uses the THINKMD app on a tablet while evaluating a child’s health. (Photo: Jon Brack)

Postdoc Spotlight: Ajit Singh, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral fellow Ajit Singh, Ph.D., works in the laboratory of Karen Glass, Ph.D., associate professor of pharmacology, where he is expanding his knowledge of chromatic biology and focusing his research on a parasite that is the main cause of malaria cases worldwide. 

“According to a WHO estimate, there were 409,000 recorded global malaria fatalities in 2019, with children under five years old being the age group most impacted,” said Dr. Singh. “There is a pressing need to define the molecular pathways behind pathogenesis in P. falciparum due to this parasite’s alarming growth in drug-resistance in recent years.” 

Singh aims to discover how chemical modifications of histone proteins, generally known as epigenetic modifications, manage DNA packing and make it accessible for translation of information contained in its unique DNA sequence. For this work, he uses various cutting-edge structural biology techniques in Dr. Glass’s lab, including X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryo-electron microscopy. 

Singh conducted his doctoral research in the lab of Dileep Vasudevan, Ph.D., at the Institute of Life Sciences in Bhubaneswar, India, and has published his research findings in journals that include Nucleic Acids Research and BBA Gene Regulatory Mechanism.

Read the UVM Graduate College’s full interview with Singh.

Pictured above: Singh stands in front of the cryo-electron microscope in the Center for Shared Biomedical Resources in the Firestone Medical Research Building.

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