My research experience freshman year gave me the foundation I needed to apply for the LHSI program, a competitive program that places interns with faculty mentors in different academic areas on the IUPUI campus. I completed my LHSI internship in May 2014, where I worked at the Prevention and Recovery Center for Early Psychosis (PARC) at Eskenazi Health Hospital. PARC is part of the IU Psychotic Disorders Program. It is a both a clinic and a research facility that treats patients in the early stages of schizophrenia and similar psychiatric disorders.

     My mentor was Dr. Michael Francis, one of the attending psychiatrists at PARC. During my internship, I helped with data checks, data entry, and general upkeep of research records, while simultaneously developing and executing my own research project from existing clinical data. My project explored the effect of childhood/adolescent social and academic functioning on illness severity of patients suffering from first-episode psychosis. I worked in the research office with a team of research technicians, recruitment specialists, nurses, and attending and resident psychiatrists, and I met weekly with Dr. Francis who helped me design and execute my project. For more information of my and Dr. Francis’s research from 2013-14, please see the linked literature review and poster.

     My time at PARC has taught me not only about the disease process of psychosis, but also about working with different mental health populations, human subjects research, and the differences between and intersection of clinical and academic psychiatry. I have also become a lot more organized since learning to work with large amounts of data, and the internship fit in perfectly with my neuroscience studies during the school year. I was even able to present the project to one of my classes, in addition to the end-of-the-year LHSI poster session. After the internship year ended, I was switched to an hourly research assistant position at PARC, where I still work. I am currently working on a project exploring the importance of inflammatory markers in schizophrenia and the use of antiviral medication as an adjunctive treatment for psychosis. I also still handle data for six different studies, as well as help with subject recruitment and running research visits.