Faculty Perspectives: Lavanya Vasudevan

Lavanya Vasudevan

Lavanya Vasudevan, Assistant Professor of Community and Family Medicine, and Affiliate in the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research, Duke Global Health Institute

Bass Connections Project Teams: Interculturally Competent Analysis of the Uptake of Routine Vaccination; mHealth for Better Routine Immunization Data in Honduras; and Vaccine Misinformation and Its Link to Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake in Durham

Data+ Summer Project: Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake

Vasudevan’s first team included four undergraduates and two graduates. They divided into subteams based on interest and language competency for Ghana and Honduras. Vasudevan highly recommends subteams because students tended to take on more leadership and opportunities.

Their team had regular meetings, team building meetings, and training around topics in vaccines, global health research and methodologies. Regular meetings were key, according to Vasudevan. She made sure to have food at the meetings, which was a hit among team members.

Vasudevan found that students were happier with team building meetings. For the team building meetings, they all visited the Duke Health Clinic and spoke with a nurse about how vaccines are stored and record keeping. They also visited a vaccine factory to see how they’re developed. There was less cohesion in her third team, which didn’t have as many of these opportunities.

Vasudevan did run into some challenges during her three years with Bass Connections. Scheduling can be difficult with a large team. “Students need to understand how hard it is to schedule,” said Vasudevan. It can help to set the meeting times ahead and emphasize how difficult it would be to adjust.

Computer science students may disappear during the summer for internships, which is important to plan for. The IRB process may take a longer period of time, especially in the health system, so that is also important to prepare for. Starting early is important.

Below are excerpts from Vasudevan’s remarks at a 2018 Bass Connections information session for faculty.

Practice and Pedagogy

Our 2015-16 team had related research and pedagogical goals. The research goal was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of vaccination practices in Honduras and Ghana in order to identify, compare and contrast barriers to vaccine uptake. Due to our focus on two diverse international settings, we identified the pedagogical goal of building skills in intercultural competence as a critical component of our project.

Building a Team

We worked with a four-student team with backgrounds in medicine, biomedical sciences, biology, global health, chemistry and math. Our team benefitted from establishing a set of protocols early in the process. We talked as a group about communication expectations and took advantage of the team-building resources on the Bass Connections website. We created a team charter, set up a list of team norms and created a collaborative syllabus – all things that we were really proud of. Our students worked in sub-teams, one focused on Ghana and one on Honduras, each with one senior-level and one less-experienced student. This allowed the students to clearly define and assign goals at the sub-team level, while being able to each contribute substantially to the overall project.

Engagement and Reflection

At both of our sites, students completed a wide range of research activities including surveys, observations, focus groups and interviews that included global stakeholders and healthcare providers doing work in the area. We also created a template for intercultural reflection, with the students sharing what they did well and what they would want others engaging in the Bass Connections process and international fieldwork to know.

The relationships and reputation that the students built during their fieldwork abroad really helped us think about subsequent iterations of the project. In Ghana, our students worked with a local partner for language and research support. In Honduras, we partnered with Clínica Esperanza who we’re continuing to work with to implement our vaccination app.

Personally for me, the best part about the experience has been the new connections with students, faculty and community partners, with whom I would otherwise not have had the opportunity to interact. The influx of new ideas and perspectives has been enriching, and it is very exciting to consider the new avenues of research that have opened up as a result.

See other faculty perspectives and learn how you can get involved in Bass Connections.