Self-Proclaimed Nerd Uses Her Passion for Research to Nurture Others
March 3, 2005 | Read Time: 5 minutes
I grew up in Black Rock, a suburb of Bridgeport, Conn., and I was one of those nerds who loved science. I didn’t have the slide rule, but I did have the big glasses. When I was 17, I can remember an insurance agent coming to the house and saying, “What do you want to
|
||||||||||
be when you grow up?” and I said I wanted to run a medical-research lab. I’ve always wanted to do this.
I started working at Hamot Medical Center’s microbiology laboratory in 1970, when I was 27 and in graduate school. I basically walked in off the street and was told, “Microbiologists are a dime a dozen. But if you have a medical-technology background, we can really use you.” I did have a degree in medical technology, so I was in luck. I was in charge of the microbiology lab for 18 years and we developed a showcase lab that was recognized nationally.
In 1988, a doctor at Hamot suggested I approach the hospital about starting a research department. I put together a program where residents could just walk right into it and get started.
The research center grew quickly. Only two or three papers were published at Hamot in the three or four years prior to when we started it. When I left two years ago, we had 27 departments reporting research activity.
But Hamot reprioritized its goals and dissolved the research center in 2002.
It worked out, though, because one of the long-term strategic plans for the center was to become a stand-alone regional institute with services available to the community. They treated me very well when they downsized me. And that allowed me to do what I really wanted to do in the first place, which was to create a nonprofit institute that would serve the entire community.
The Lake Erie Research Institute works with people in medical research — some of whom have never done research — and helps them through the entire process. It’s a wraparound process in which we take the researcher from the conception of the idea all the way through publication. Most institutes don’t have anything like this.
If a physician or a nurse has an idea, we take them from the embryonic stage through business-plan development, protocol development, the approval process, clinical trials, data analysis, and finally tech transfer — which is often the most difficult piece, since it takes something that has worked in testing and puts it into the manufacturing process.
The local medical centers are interested in what we’re doing because a lot of their residency programs require research activity, but most of the physicians are not trained to teach how to research. That’s my cup of tea. I like to do it. I like to work with the residents and the physicians.
A lot of my immediate role is communicator and evangelist. I celebrate our research and the talent that we work with throughout the region, to communicate our role and generate support. The other part is sitting down with the researchers and investigators and helping them get off the ground. I like working with them. I like to see them say, “I’m really going to get published.” Every once in a while someone gets fired up — really fired up — and all of a sudden they come back to you and they bloom. One of the best parts of it is helping these young people. It’s just very enjoyable to do that, to help them succeed and to realize I have something to offer them and inspire them.
One of the most promising projects has been a new theory for early breast-cancer detection by Dr. [Leonard R.] Coover, from Hamot’s department of nuclear medicine. Using his procedure, we evaluated 37 women with normal mammograms and normal clinical exams, and of the 37 normal women, we picked up three cancers that would have been undetectable without this test.
Some of this stuff is just so interesting and you think that without it life would be pretty boring. The thing I fear most in life is being bored.
When I started the institute, David McClelland, the former director of the Ben Franklin Foundation, came along and said, “Phyll, I know what you want to do. Let me help you.”
He helped us put together a grant proposal with the Ben Franklin program to provide seed money to the center. We were able to secure a series of three special-projects grants totaling $385,000. That grant supports us for three years, but after that, we’re on our own.
In our first 18 months, we obtained eight grants for a total of $400,000 in funds [including the Ben Franklin Foundation grants], which is really remarkable for a new institute. We’ve had many publications with our physicians and we’ve evaluated seven potential new products. Some of these products are now in the prototype stage.
Our biggest challenge right now is to find a stable funding source. We have to show that indeed we have value that we can offer to the community. And it’s not just the medical community. It’s the academic community, local industry, the local economy. If we can garner support — and what we’re working on right now is bringing universities together — then we can approach people in the political arena so we can perhaps tap into state funds and ensure the integrity and longevity of the institute.
It would behoove the organizations in the medical community and industrial community to support us. The timing is critical. If they do, that’s fine. If they don’t, we’ll just continue on.
Most people give up. Persistence is what brings a lot of things to fruition. The persistence combined with the expertise of knowing how to do it. I always go back to something Mother Teresa said: If somebody destroys your life’s work in three days, you turn around and go right on building. That’s what we do. Just keep right on building.
