- While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Do you hope to produce an annotated bibliography that you reflect on down the line? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.
The tangible goal for the end of this summer is to create a guide that will help our team build a playbook (a little meta, I know). Right now, that means digging through a wide range of existing playbooks and guidebooks, pulling out what’s useful, and synthesizing those pieces into something that fits our needs. I’ve already identified a few things that matter for our version: it has to be something multiple stakeholders can actually use, it has to be interactive rather than a static PDF that no one revisits, and it has to be descriptive instead of prescriptive.
By the end of the summer, I want to have a structured, usable guide that sets up the team to build the full playbook during the academic year. This is definitely a sub‑project of the larger research effort, but it’s also what will make the larger project possible. Without a clear framework, the playbook risks becoming another document that gestures at equity without giving anyone a way to practice it. My work this summer is meant to prevent that and to give us a foundation that scientists, funders, and universities can eventually rely on.
- Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.
My research looks at the relationships between different stakeholders in genomics research (funders, researchers, universities, and the communities whose data and biological materials make the science possible) and asks how these partnerships can become more equitable. This question matters because inequity isn’t an occasional flaw in genomics research, it’s built into the way partnerships are formed, negotiated, and maintained. Power imbalances shape everything from who gets to set the research agenda to who benefits from the results.
As someone who hopes to become a scientist and physician working in or alongside genomics, this is a very crucial question to explore. If I’m going to enter a field that has the potential to transform medicine, I want to be part of reshaping the structures that determine who that transformation actually serves. Genomics has extraordinary promise, but that promise is unevenly distributed. Communities that have historically been excluded from scientific decision‑making are often the same communities asked to “trust” institutions that have not always earned that trust. Studying these dynamics now gives me a vocabulary for naming the inequities that people often treat as inevitable and allows me to imagine alternatives that I can eventually contribute to.