“Community-engaged research” has become a buzzword in translational research, but what does it mean in practice?
Finding out was the aim of Laboni Hoque, M.D., a 2024 graduate of Harvard Medical School (HMS), when she signed up for a practice placement through Harvard Catalyst’s Community Engagement Program (CEP). Embedded with The Community Builders (TCB), a housing non-profit dedicated to developing high-quality affordable homes for families, seniors, and people with disabilities, Dr. Hoque got a crash course in how to build community engagement – and how not to. She then applied those learnings to her senior scholarly project at the same organization two years later.
The work earned her the Robert Ebert Prize for Health Care Delivery Research or Service, awarded annually at the Soma Weiss Student Research Day. Next up is residency in internal medicine at Yale Medical School. She’s pursuing primary care, she said, because she wants to develop the kind of meaningful, long-term relationships with her patients that would enable social determinants of health such as housing and food security to be addressed…
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