For Grace Leu Burke, MLS(ASCP), the thrill of winning a poster award at ASCP 2022 was seeing her undergraduate MLS students present their research at an international meeting.
“This experience will help to set them up to advance in their careers and create opportunities that help them down the line,” says Ms. Burke, who teaches microbiology and molecular diagnostics in the Medical Laboratory Science program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
ASCP is now accepting poster abstract submissions to be considered for presentation at the ASCP 2023 Annual Meeting, October 18–20, in Long Beach, CA.
When Ms. Burke joined the University of Alaska, Anchorage, in 2018, she received the university’s approval to establish a research program as part of the Medical Laboratory Science curriculum.
“There are not a lot of MLS programs out there that are doing abstracts and research,” she explains. “We are a science-driven field. We generate the data, and we should be presenting the data. Presenting elevates who we are as a profession.”
The MLS research program Ms. Burke oversees at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, focuses on the region’s surrounding environment around them. Alaska is renowned for its wildlife, including an abundance of resident moose—1,500, to be precise—that walk everywhere in Anchorage and leave fecal droppings. Residents are accustomed to it. Yet, Ms. Burke wondered if it might be unhealthy. No one had ever studied the issue.
So Ms. Burke developed the MLS program’s research project around studying stool samples from the local moose population. With the students, she developed the initial protocols to be consistent with testing and that would align with the MLS program’s academic outcomes.
Another aspect of the research was to determine what type of bacteria the moose droppings might contain. “We need to be aware of microbes in our environment,” she says. “They are the ones that will be colonized on patients who come into the hospital.”
So Ms. Burke and her students have examined the types of bacteria the fecal matter contained, and then they explored the types of antibiotics to use if this became an organism that infected someone. “This is an urban environment here people work and play, and we have a significant homeless population that could be affected,” she says. “Ultimately, we discovered there were more organisms with significant resistance to antibiotics than I expected.”
Since 2018, the study has analyzed more than 300 moose samples, “enough volume to make predictions,” she says. “The poster that my students presented at the ASCP 2022 Annual Meeting examined E. coli isolates and how their resistance changed over the time since we began analyzing it.”
This research has helped Ms. Burke’s students recognize the concept of a sample in patient care, and they now recognize the impact that has in public health. “My students realize this because we do poster abstracts—it’s not just what we study, but how we impact the population in our region,” she explains.
Got a research project you’d like to showcase to a global audience? Submit your poster abstract by May 12 to be considered for presentation at the ASCP 2023 Annual Meeting. Click here for information.
