A sense of pride and gratitude led Dr. Doris Taylor to put together the inaugural II+C (Imagine, Inspire, Challenge) Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. As one of The W’s most accomplished alumna, the pioneering medical researcher eagerly accepted the invitation, pulling together a group of renowned experts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for the symposium, which was held Thursday and Friday at the Nissan Auditorium on the MUW campus.
With that came an unspoken agreement that she might return for next year’s symposium.
“I really didn’t know what to expect,” Taylor said Friday after the symposium had came to a close. “I thought maybe we would have 100 people show up. I was willing to come back, sure. But if there had been 25 or 100 people, we probably would have to talk about it more to see if it was worth the time and energy.”
That uncertainty vanished the moment Taylor took the stage Thursday evening to introduce keynote speaker Dr. Robert Robbins.
The 400-seat auditorium was filled to capacity and then some. The W quickly arranged to have video/audio set up in a nearby classroom. All 60 seats in the classroom quickly filled as well.
“I never expected that,” Taylor said.
The same overflow crowds descended on Nissan Auditorium Friday morning for the two 90-minute panel discussions, with Taylor joining Ole Miss chemistry student Alex Wallace and MUW biology professor Dr. Ross Whitwam to encourage students to pursue summer research internships.
As the symposium unfolded, Taylor was struck not only by the size of the crowd, but the energy it reflected back on the speakers.
“A lot of times when you are giving a talk, people are falling asleep, reading things on their phones, getting up and leaving,” Taylor said. “I didn’t see a lot of that. I think people were kind of stunned and blown away. So many people came up afterward and spoke to the panelists, which is a testament to the relevance what we were saying has in their lives.”
Like Taylor, MUW President Jim Borsig, wasn’t quite prepared to the response the first symposium would produce.
“Since this was the first one, it was the pilot and prototype, so we really didn’t know what to expect,” Borsig said. “I was stunned, not only by the turnout, but by the impact it had on the students and how they just flocked not only to Doris, but to all the panelists. … We haven’t even started to talk about where we will go from here, but I can’t imagine a better start for the symposium than what we just witnessed.”
Putting together the lineup
The challenge, as Taylor saw it, was for a panel of experts with an alphabet soup of acronyms after their names — everything from PhD to ScD to MD to MACC, et al — to engage with students in a personal, relevant manner.
“I thought of all the people I know and have worked with in the past and who would really connect with the students,” Taylor said. “I invited those people to come and talk about their own stories and experiences and how what they do is relevant to what we do here in Mississippi. A lot of people, when they think of scientists and researchers, the image they have is of Albert Einstein, not of people like themselves.”
From the keynote address by Robbins, CEO of Texas Medical Center in Houston, to the question-and-answer session featuring Dr. Jane Reckelhoff of University of Mississippi Medical Center, Dr Janet Rich-Edward of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts and Dr. Nanette Wenger of Emory University School of Medicine, the audience was exposed to ideas relevant to their own lives as students.
MUW graduate student Katelyn Comish of Jackson, who hopes to be a veterinarian, seemed to speak for most of the audience in assessing the symposium.
“Even though I’m not going into the field of heart medicine, I really was fascinated by the idea of research that is going on,” she said. “To hear about all the opportunities there are in research was really interesting. I wish I could have gone all of the sessions.”
The final session included Wallace’s discussion of how a summer research internship at Texas Heart Institute made her a better student and Whitwam’s often humorous account of his own summer internship.
“I had planned to get a restaurant job, but a research opportunity came up, and I spent the summer researching sea snails,” he said. “By the end of the summer, I was totally fascinated by sea snails. So whatever you research, believe me, you’re going to love it, whether it’s in your field or not. You may wind up doing research on toenails … and you’re going to discover that toenails are absolutely fascinating.”
From The W to world renown
Fittingly, Taylor — who works for the Texas Heart Institute in Houston — was the final speaker.
Through her research in regenerative medicine, the 1977 MUW biology graduate is on the leading edge of what may well be the biggest break-through in heart medicine in a generation — using a patient’s own stem cells to rebuild a diseased/injured heart, an advancement that could render heart transplants, and the complications that often accompany them, obsolete.
But it was Taylor’s own experiences as a young student at MUW that appealed most to the audience.
“I wasn’t the best student out there, didn’t have the best GPA,” she said. “But I had the support of some wonderful professors, and through them, I learned that what it’s all about, really, is asking questions and never being satisfied. You don’t have to be good at answers. What you have to be good at is thinking about the question.
“So don’t think you can’t do this. You can,” she added. “All of you can change the world if you want to. But you know what, the world is going to change whether you make that choice or not. So the question is, if it’s not you, then who?”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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