Ian Cero<\/strong>, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry, explained the urgent need to provide suicide prevention therapies to the growing number of people \u201cwho are balancing on a knife\u2019s edge right now,\u201d and yet, in the vast majority of cases, \u201care so distressed that they do not want to be found.\u201d His proposal: Identify suicide clusters from Twitter and other social media, then apply algorithms to insure anonymity. In essence: \u201cSaving lives without ever even knowing who we\u2019re saving.\u201d<\/p>\n Ghazi took first place in the University\u2019s Falling Walls competition<\/strong> and will represent Rochester in a similar competition at the international conference in Berlin next month. Cero won the Steadman Family Postdoctoral Award in Interdisciplinary Research<\/a> during Meliora Weekend\u2014just as Jillian Ramos<\/strong>, a PhD student in biology, won first place in the University\u2019s Three-Minute Thesis<\/a> contest last spring for her presentation: \u201cModify or Die: When Protein Translation Goes Awry.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n All of these competitions are relatively new. They reflect the growing importance for researchers to be able to communicate with:<\/p>\n Cero, who has participated in multiple competitions and won at least one other, sees another advantage. \u201cA lot of the work we do is complicated and really difficult. You\u2019re in the nitty-gritty, you\u2019re working through the numbers, you\u2019re checking every statistical assumption, and it\u2019s easy to lose sight of the big picture,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you have to distill the work that you\u2019re doing in five minutes and a static slide, I think it helps you think more clearly about your own work.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, as Ghazi puts it: \u201cIf I can communicate the problem that I\u2019m trying to fix in just a few minutes, that is really going to let me focus not only on the problem at hand but about where I need to go next.\u201d<\/p>\n The Steadman competition is now in its third year. Just since last year, there has been a \u201cbig improvement\u201d in the overall quality of the presentations, says Sturge-Apple.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it has to do with getting the information out about the award to our fellows and generating excitement about it,\u201d she says. \u201cAlso,\u00a0I think they are seeing this as a professional development opportunity.\u201d\u00a0 The competitors were given an opportunity to work with an expert in communications and public speaking. \u201cI thought every one of the talks this year reflected that.\u201d<\/p>\n So much so that the Steadman contest judges gave two awards for second place, and there was a two-way tie for the people\u2019s choice award. Similarly, judges at the Falling Walls competition also gave two awards for second place.<\/p>\n Cero, who was on debate teams in high school and college, has this advice for other researchers who want to hone their communications skills, and perhaps enter a competition themselves:<\/p>\n \u201cFind a quick anecdote that summarizes the idea. The audience has to digest a lot really quickly, and that\u2019s hard to do, even if they\u2019re working to pay attention.\u00a0 In the first two or three minutes, follow some kind of emotional theme that will allow listeners to fill in the blanks as you keep talking. That tends to help a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n This was Ghazi\u2019s first such competition. He will compete against 99 other researchers and entrepreneurs from around the world at the annual Berlin conference, which commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall. The competition highlights ideas about how to \u201cbreak down walls\u201d to overcome key challenges confronting science and society.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll see a hundred people come up with a hundred different ideas, and they all put them across in three minutes. So, it\u2019s a beautiful snapshot of what\u2019s going on around the world,\u201d says Provost Rob Clark, the University\u2019s senior vice president for research who has often attended the conference and won approval for the qualifying contest here.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cFor us, it\u2019s a great opportunity to share the ideas that are underway here in Rochester.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exciting,\u201d Ghazi says, \u201cbut I definitely have to ramp up my game if I\u2019m going to compete against the world in Berlin. It adds another level of anxiety, but also another level of excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n Why do people die by suicide?<\/p>\n What made her kill herself — if you\u2019re wondering about someone specific. Why did he take his life? And was there something that the hospital could have done on the day that he or she died?<\/p>\n These are questions that keep people up at night. And these are the questions that suicide researchers devote their lives to.<\/p>\n But unfortunately, from a prevention perspective, they are the wrong questions. Answers to why people die by suicide won\u2019t bring our loved ones back to us, and they don\u2019t tell us how to intervene with the people who are balancing on a knife\u2019s edge right now.<\/p>\n In the United States, the suicide rate has been steadily climbing for the last 50 years. It\u2019s now the 10th leading cause of death overall and the second leading cause of death among people under 25 — now more than doubling the number of homicides that we see every single year.<\/p>\n But despite the fact that the rate has been climbing, we\u2019ve learned a lot in the last 50 years about how to help the people who come into our clinics. We now have evidence-based psychotherapies that can significantly reduce the rate of death by suicide among the people who receive them. And we even have mobile apps that have been shown to significantly reduce the rate of suicide attempts in multiple randomized control trials among their users.<\/p>\n Without being too cute about it, there\u2019s an app for that. But who should we deliver those apps to?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, our work has been with people in clinics. And 81 percent of the people who die by suicide aren\u2019t seen by a mental health professional within a month of their death. That means that even if our treatments were perfect, we would still lose four out of every five people we intend to save,<\/p>\n How to get existing life-saving treatments to the four out of every five people who are so distressed that they do not want to be found, that\u2019s the right question.<\/p>\n I first became concerned about suicide and suicide research when I as working on my PhD in clinical psychology at Auburn University. I had the sense that the last 50 years of slow progress was going to continue unless we developed interdisciplinary alternatives.<\/p>\n There needed to be a way to mix in mathematical rigor into psychological insights.<\/p>\n So, alongside my PhD, I pursued a masters\u2019 degree in statistics. I decided to do interdisciplinary research as an interdisciplinary researcher.<\/p>\n Over the course of that time I recognized that suicides often seem to cluster–whether it\u2019s a spike in the rate of suicides that happen after a celebrity dies, or a large number of students who die in the same high school, all seemingly at the same time. Most of the existing research focuses on why those things happen, and what it is that we can do to prevent them. But, unfortunately, we still haven\u2019t come up with any answers.<\/p>\n I decided to take a different approach. Instead of asking why those clusters happen, we should focus on harnessing them and seeing if we can make them useful for prevention.<\/p>\n To get at that, I asked native English speakers to rate the 10,000 most common words in native English. These are words that you see behind you \u2013 depressed, dying, crisis, sad, and hopeless \u2013 for their relatedness to suicide. After we had those words stored, I programmed a $20 credit-card sized microcomputer called a Raspberry Pi to collect a one percent random sample of all the real time activity on Twitter for a two-month period. This resulted in a data set that had about 65 million posts constructed by 17 million unique users.<\/p>\n Each user was then flagged according to how many of these suicide-related words they had used over the course of that period. And users were regarded as linked in the network if they had reciprocally interacted with each other at least once over the course of the study period.<\/p>\n What you see behind you is a random subset of that 17 million user network that we were able to construct. Lightly colored nodes are people who never talked about suicide at all. Darker shaded nodes are people who talked about suicide at least once. Moreover, the dark nodes that know at least one other person who talked about suicide are circled and connected in blue.<\/p>\n What you are looking at here are suicide clusters rendered visible to the naked eye.<\/p>\n But just being able to identify these clusters isn\u2019t enough. Could we in some way use them for prevention?<\/p>\n Most of the time when we perform screening to see who is at risk out there in the environment, we either screen randomly with as many resources as we can get, or we wait for people to come to us. Networks of this kind and the structures that you see in front of you, suggest that an alternative might be better.<\/p>\n Snowball screening \u2013 go out in the world until you find someone who is at risk. Once you find that person, screen all of their friends. Among those people who are at risk, screen their friends. And so on.<\/p>\n My subsequent simulations show that if we take this approach, we could more than double the number of at risk people we can find with exactly the same number of resources.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a significant improvement for suicide prevention but it\u2019s not enough on its own. If we want to be able to deliver life-saving treatments to people who don\u2019t want to be found, we need to be able to insure their anonymity.<\/p>\n Which is why the next steps in my project will include using block chain technology — the same algorithms that run bitcoin — to be able to deliver these treatments to people anonymously, saving lives without ever even knowing who we\u2019re saving.<\/p>\n Thank you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hello. My name is Ahmed Ghazi. I\u2019m a surgeon by training and a student at the Warner School of Education. Today I am breaking the wall of surgical errors.<\/p>\n Over the past decade, the quality and safety of health care in the United States has been a point of major public concern and also a focus of significant research<\/p>\n Surgical and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States, and multiple articles have brought this to the attention of the public. But nothing was more eye opening than an article that equated the number of deaths from medical and surgical errors to five Boeing 747s crashing every week for an entire year.<\/p>\n So, it\u2019s obvious we have a problem, and for that we need a solution.<\/p>\n And a better way to look at the solution is to look back at another high-stakes industry that has made safer outcomes.<\/p>\n We all remember the Hudson Miracle, when Captain Sully (Sullenberger) was able to ditch a plane in the Hudson. He had never done this before, but he saved the lives of 191 passengers.\u00a0 But he was only able to do this because he practiced this over and over and over again in a very realistic environment. Unlike machines, our bodies are very different. So, if we want to create the same perfection of practice, we have to find not only a realistic but a specific customized platform for each of our patients.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been working on this for about three years now\u2013 and yes, it does involve 3-D printing. The process starts with a patient\u2019s image, like this one with a tumor in their kidney. Then, using a segmentation software we are able to convert that into a three-dimensional CAD, which can then send a signal over to the 3-D printer. But if I were to directly 3-D print this, it would result in a very hard plastic model\u2014which is only a visual tool that a surgeon cannot practice on.<\/p>\n So, we started to print molds, which, after injecting with a hydrogel specifically formulated to replicate human properties, allowed us to create a patient-specific, realistic model.<\/p>\n We put that in a body cast, with all the other surrounding models that we need to do the surgery, and take it down to an operating room where a surgeon can then practice their patient\u2019s procedure, over and over and over again, until they perfect it. The best part of this practice is that surgeons can look at the model after the fact and figure out what went right, but more importantly what went wrong \u2013 something that we would only realize as surgeons after the fact.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve done this in limited number of patients and found a tremendous improvement in outcomes. The kicker here is that this is very cheap, the overhead cost is $5,000, and each model costs less than $50.<\/p>\n This has a huge impact not only in healthcare safety but training our future surgeons. Thank you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Competitions are helping early career scientists hone their ability to communicate their research in short, compelling, and easily understood presentations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":286,"featured_media":343662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[31442,486,25882,18432,21582],"class_list":["post-343052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sci-tech","tag-ahmed-ghazi","tag-awards","tag-melissa-sturge-apple","tag-school-of-medicine-and-dentistry","tag-suicide"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Jillian](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/ramos.jpg\")
\n
A professional development opportunity<\/h2>\n
\nSaving the lives of those who don’t want to be found \u2014Ian Cero<\/em><\/h3>\n
![\"Slide](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/suicide-cluster.jpg\")
Breaking the wall of surgical errors
\n\u2014Ahmed Ghazi<\/em><\/h3>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/organs.jpg\")