Hello,
My name is Rebecca Wernick. I am a rising junior at Barnard College studying computational biology. This summer I am working at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California as a research intern at the F. Widjaja Inflammatory Bowel Research Institute. Throughout this summer, my primary focus revolves around an innovative project that investigates the profound benefits of a comprehensive pre and post rehabilitation program for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) undergoing diverse surgical procedures. As the study is still in the beginning phases, there are many things to do in order to make sure the study continues on smoothly as we collect more data. One main part of the experiment includes working with a registered dietitian, a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist and a social worker. After each patient visit is complete, we collect data from the visit enter it into a special platform called Redcap. So far, as we have gotten our first few patients I have fine-tuned our data collection requirements and communicated with the rest of the team on further improvements in the process for both the research end and our patients. Another part of the pre-hab project includes an initial patient outreach where I talk to each patient about the various benefits of joining our study. After they have been consented, I aid in fitting and training each patient to use a special device that will track various factors over the study. I am also working on outreach for the project in order to bring more patients into our study. As the summer goes on and there is more data to work with I will use the statistical program R to run various tests on our data. I will also be working with the bioinformatician on our team to build shell tables for our data so as the study goes on we can continue to easily work with the data at hand.