Emily Chestnut, a third-year student at the Terre Haute campus, has received a $6,000 Indiana Primary Care Advancement in Clinical Training (INPACT) grant. The project, supervised by Janice Farlow, MD, PhD, and Robert Ehresman, MD, will be carried out in the Terre Haute community.
The grant supports a community-based participatory research initiative aimed at engaging medical students in the following activities:
- Conducting a needs assessment of community attitudes toward oral health and access to care
- Developing an online curriculum for IU School of Medicine students focused on oral health education and local care barriers (based on findings from the needs assessment in Specific Aim 1)
- Empowering a student-led task force to partner annually with Terre Haute community members to address identified specific barriers to oral healthcare (also based on the needs assessment developed in Specific Aim 1)
This initiative strengthens IU School of Medicine’s ongoing relationship with the Terre Haute community through continued free oral cancer screenings and collaborative research. It also offers students hands-on experience in community-led research and the creation of educational materials on oral health and head/neck cancer to share with our fellow future doctors.
