"Speaker 1: My name is Lauren Wallner and we're here at the University of Michigan in
the Department of Medicine.
I am a faculty member in the CanSORT group, which is a Cancer Surveillance Outcomes and
Research focused group of investigators.
Well, I grew up in New Jersey and also here in Michigan.
I was a pretty curious kid by nature and I think my parents really supported that and
were always giving us opportunities to learn about new things and travel and really foster
that.
I was really always sort of interested in medicine and health in general and particularly
had a fascination with diseases and why they happen and what happens once you get them,
so I decided to go to the University of Michigan for my undergraduate training.
I was pre-med initially and I thought that I wanted to be a physician, and it was really
during this time that I was exposed to the disciple of public health and the idea that
you could improve health on a population level and actually affect more people than you would
by being a physician potentially.
I then went on to get a PhD in epidemiology.
My work really blends both epidemiology and public health with medicine, so the majority
of my research focuses on trying to improve care for both breast and prostate cancer patients.
What I try to do is build the science to understand patient's care and support needs while they're
going through treatment and after in the survivorship period.
I design and analyze and run research studies of patients with cancer.
Okay, so one of the studies we have going in the field right now is a large survey study
of women with breast cancer.
We're currently sending survey packets to over 5,000 women asking them a variety of
questions about their treatment experience, how they made their decisions for treatment
for breast cancer, a lot of questions about the care that they're receiving and so on.
In order to disseminate our information from our research findings, what we normally do
is we publish in medical journals, we present at meetings that are with other clinicians
and oncologists who treat cancer patients.
a system where it could populate information where it would be added to a personalized
or tailored survivorship care plan.
One new avenue actually that we're using quite a bit now is social media, so most of the
faculty in our group have an active presence on Twitter.
We're engaging with patients that way as well.
We also are developing some pretty cool tools where clinicians can access information online
to get what they need to help better care for their patients.
We're doing the same for patients, so we developed web-based tools where patients can get information
to help them make better cancer treatment decisions or understand what they need to
do after treatment to keep up with their care needs.
The cancer group in general is a very dynamic bunch of investigators.
We are all very, very passionate about what we do.
We all come from different backgrounds, so I'm actually the only epidemiologist on the
team, and with that I bring the training that comes along with that, and so we have weekly
team science meetings where we get together in a room and we talk about the science and
we talk about designing the science, carrying out the science, the details of it, but really
it's an avenue to bring together ideas from people of various backgrounds and try to improve
upon those ideas.
We definitely have a regular interaction where we try to problem-solve things and come up
with solutions for what we're facing, as well as really trying to, again, generate those
unique ideas and those unique research questions that will ultimately make a difference in
cancer patient's lives.