I am so excited to announce that I’ll be working with Dr. James Clawson and Michael this summer!

Our project will be focusing on assisting homebirth midwives, especially in the case where a labor goes wrong and the patient has to be transported to the hospital. This transfer is stressful on everyone, particularly because as of now there is no good way for the midwife to transfer her pregnancy records to the hospital, meaning that the hospital has a woman in labor with no apparent pregnancy records show up on their front doorstep. Often this leads to increased medical attention, which is usually the exact opposite of what the mother wants. By creating a program or app that manages and transfers these records, we hope to reduce stress levels in all parties and help support the mother’s autonomy.

We started off today by having a research meeting, which essentially gathered the ProHealth REU students, graduate students, and faculty. We each introduced ourselves to the group, mentioned what project we were working on, and told a few fun facts about ourselves. It was great to get to know others a little better!

Afterwards, Michael and I got to sit down with Dr. Clawson and talk over our project. I’m really excited with how many different directions we can take this! My main focus will likely be designing and coding, but I also would really like to try out more research-related things, such as interviewing midwives and maybe mothers-to-be, coding that data, etc.

The rest of the afternoon was largely spent preparing our elevator pitches, which we presented at our tea at 3:00. We had some delicious chocolate cake! I thought everyone did a good job at their pitches and was pretty impressed by several. Afterwards, we hung around a while longer and then were dismissed for the weekend. Though it’s been a good week, I’m excited to go home and watch my brother graduate high school! Because of Memorial Day, it’s a long weekend, so I’ll be back at it on Tuesday!