Summayah El Azzioui is a senior at Emory double majoring in Human Health and Linguistics on the pre-med track. Her research areas include biomedical sciences, public health (epidemiology), and social sciences. Currently, Summayah conducts research in Dr. Ken Kishida's computational neuroscience lab at Wake Forest School of Medicine. She studies the role of neighborhood-level factors in characterizing decision-making behaviors among patients with varying depression severity. In her project, she is investigating neighborhood structure, specifically social deviance, cohesion, and social stress, and its correlation with reward and punishment learning. An additional focus of the project is determining whether racial disparities exist within the study population.
Summayah has been involved in research since sophomore year. Her first research experience was year-long through SIRE and The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, a Rollins-affiliated institute. She found the opportunity while cold-emailing researchers across Emory who focused on social determinants of health. Summayah worked on the EnFaith Project, examining how religious stigma influences abortion attitudes with faculty mentors Dr. Whitney Rice and Johanna Pringle. The research used qualitative methods to analyze interviews of religious leaders and congregants. At the end of the experience, she gave an oral presentation at Emory’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in Spring 2022.
Summayah began working on her current research topic by chance. She was randomly matched with her current mentor, Dr. Kishida, while participating in a summer research program at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Summer 2022. During that summer, she explored ways in which to integrate applications of social determinants of health with neuroscience data, with a focus on neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation. Summayah enjoyed the experience and decided to continue her work in the lab the following summer; this time, branching off with her own project that examines neighborhood social conditions and their impact on decision-making behavior. She chose this new project topic because she really enjoyed the previous project and wanted to look further in-depth at social determinants more generally.
Summayah states that some benefits of research involvement include networking opportunities, training beyond the classroom, and increased insight into the logistics of research studies. As a result of Summayah’s different research positions, she has had the opportunity to meet many people with different backgrounds and interests who have shared their wisdom and contributed to her learning both academically and professionally. For example, her research enabled her to attend ABRCMS, a national biomedical sciences research conference, in Fall 2022 to present her work alongside other undergraduates. The hands-on experience in the field has helped Summayah implement real-world applications of what she learned in her coursework and explore beyond theoretical knowledge. Additionally, the hands-on experience has given her opportunities to see firsthand how labs operate, including writing and submitting her own IRB application and exposure to clinical research methods.
Summayah’s short-term goals are to learn more about different methods of statistical analysis and to improve her coding skills in R and Python programming languages. These two concepts are essential to the successful analysis and interpretation of her research data. She would also like to present her study at another national or international conference by the end of the school year. In the long term, Summayah has the career goal of being a physician-scientist; intertwining her interests in practicing medicine and conducting epidemiological research. She hopes to continue research in health disparities and social determinants of health in American clinical populations.
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