2009 HSLIC Medical Student Awards

Each year, the Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center solicits nominations from SOM faculty for its three medical student awards. These awards recognize medical students who excel in various aspects of Biomedical Informatics, including teaching, information seeking and critical appraisal, and research.

Award for Excellence in Teaching Service

Matthew Smith, M.D.

Dr Smith received this award in recognition of his teaching skills in the academic clinical environment.

Dr Smith shares high-quality reference information with patients and their families to help them make choices in their care, listens with empathy, and provides written and visual resources to his patients so they can better understand their choices in disease management. Dr. Smith spends time with his patients to discuss the resources and to answer their questions. He regularly brings visual resources and high-quality reference materials to the clinical teams as well.

Award for Excellence in Informatics

Katie Forman, M.D. and David Meredith, M.D.

Two graduating seniors shared this award for their outstanding use of informatics in their student research project.

Drs. Forman and Meredith authored the research paper “"Postmortem Analysis of Synovial Fluid: An Alternative Method for Determining the Presence of Ethanol” that drew upon a thorough literature review coupled to laboratory results from local institutions such as TriCore and the Office of the Medical Investigator.

Award for Excellence in Information Seeking & Critical Appraisal

Kurt Pedrotty

Five different UNM School of Medicine faculty members nominated Mr. Pedrotty for this award based upon his demonstrated information seeking and critical appraisal skills during Phase One problem-based learning tutorials.

Mr. Pedrotty, who has just completed his Phase One blocks, won this award for bringing high quality information to tutorials, citing his sources, describing his search strategies, applying critical thinking skills to the information he brought to tutorials, and receiving a perfect score on the Evidence-Based Medicine Informatics component of his Summative 2 Exam.