Come fall, some local students may learn that sometimes you win by losing -- losing bad habits, that is. Duke junior and Durham native Jamie Bell has spent the better part of her free time this year developing an obesity prevention education program for local children that she hopes to be able to soon implement. Currently under review, the plan will teach students at Durham Performance Learning Center, an alternative high school, about nutrition, hydration, reading labels and building exercise into daily routines.
Weekly education sessions taught by Bell and students chosen as peer educators, as well as opportunities for the students to measure body fat percentages and obtain nutritional analyses, will incorporate healthy lifestyle choices into the students' lives.
"The project focuses on teaching students easy ways to understand and maintain their personal health," Bell said. "I hope to motivate teen-agers by giving them an active role in designing the curriculum and encouraging them to take a leadership role in teaching their peers what they've learned."
A biomedical engineering major with an eye on medical school, Bell has spent three years at Duke combining her intellectual interests with her passion for community service and public health. For her work, Duke's Community Service Center presented her with the 2007-08 Lars Lyon Service Award, which recognizes a rising sophomore, junior or senior who exhibits a strong commitment to community service work.
The prize is named for a Duke mechanical engineering student who died in 1988 of a rare cancer. While at Duke, Lyon was a leader in university community service.
Most of Bell's community service has involved volunteer work with Duke's Division of Community Health. Tia Simmons, medical instructor in the division at DUMC's Division of Community Health, is one of Bell's supervisors. Simmons said she is impressed with Bell's professionalism and commitment to the community. "Her flexibility, creativity and ability to interface with diverse populations are impeccable in every community effort," Simmons wrote in nominating Bell for the Lyon award.
Bell's interest in public health started when she competed as a Young Epidemiology Scholar her senior year at Jordan High School in Durham. As one of 50 finalists nationwide, she was invited to present her project, "Freshman Nutrition and Exercise Study," to public health luminaries in Washington, D.C. She placed third in the competition and brought home a $20,000 scholarship.
"All the judges were respected public health professionals involved in inspiring research," Bell said. "Just being in that atmosphere, hearing about others' projects, inspired me. Childhood obesity was an important topic in the health field."
In the spring of her freshman year, Bell began work with the Duke Community Health Learning Together Program. It's been a good fit both for student and program. Bell has conducted surveys and collected and analyzed data, and she has led health education sessions at local elementary schools and spearheaded a health fair at Watts Elementary School.
Some of Bell's most valuable projects have targeted childhood obesity. In addition to developing the proposed program at the Durham Performance Learning Center, Bell was a member of the care management team at the Duke Outpatient Clinic Weight Loss Program and created nutrition and exercise brochures for the Duke Health Clinic at Southern High School in Durham.
The variety of projects exposed her to people who had not had the same opportunities she had, she said. "You have to understand about so many other cultures to be a good doctor," she said.
In addition to devoting two to six hours a week to volunteer work, Bell has made her mark as well through two years of undergraduate research at the Pratt School of Engineering. She's recently received a Pratt Research Fellowship for project studying the electrophysiologic mechanisms that underlie cardiac arrhythmias, work that she's doing in collaboration with Pratt biomedical engineering professor and pediatric cardiologist Salim Idriss.
In addition, Bell has made poster and oral presentations at professional conferences and, as part of a research team, has had her work published in professional journals. She has participated in summer programs at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Bell said the Lars Lyon Award is particularly meaningful for her because it will give publicity to the Learning Together program and perhaps attract more volunteers. But she said she encourages other students to seek out volunteer work they have a passion for, rather than something that will boost their credentials.
"If you care about the topic, what you are doing and share it with others, that will mean a whole lot more than just doing some random service work for your resume," she said. "I was lucky to find something I really enjoy doing."