Megara Asllani
Biography
Fun Fact: I’m good at badminton!
Hey! My name is Megara Asllani, and I’m from Elmhurst, IL. My intended concentration is International and Public Relations, in the hopes of becoming an immigration lawyer! I’m interested in this field because I grew up in an immigrant, Albanian household! I love doing art, so I can’t wait to take classes at RISD, and I’m also pretty okay at guitar. I’m super excited to be apart of the PSP because not only is it an awesome opportunity to connect with my professors and get involved in research, internships, etc, but I’m also supported by a diverse group of peers!
Research
I started the summer off at Northwestern’s Elevate lab’s ACCERT Patient Navigation (PN) study. This is a patient navigation study seeing the efficacy of 3 different types of patient navigators (checklist, AI, or standard patient navigator) for improving cancer screenings rates for marginalized communities around Chicago. My role in this study was to mainly conduct participant outreach through calls and going to community events where I would run through an overview of the study, participant eligibility, and follow through with participants who had consented to being a part of the study. I’d conduct baseline surveys to consented participants, and then later orient them into one of three of our experimental groups. Throughout all of this, I had been inputting participant information into REDcap for participant tracking and demographic data. Later into the summer, I was involved in data coding for transcripts and data visualization with ELEVATE’s previous Chinatown PN study that then culminated in a cohesive study report and presentation to Lurie Children's Hospital staff and interns.