Carle Illinois College of Medicine’s new director of student research believes that the most powerful medical research discoveries and health care innovations start at the same place: at the bedside confronting real patient problems. Dr. Suguna Pappu is leveraging her clinical expertise as a neurosurgeon and her research background to mentor physician-innovators seeking to impact patient care and advance the practice of medicine.
Pappu first came to CI MED in 2021 as a clinical associate professor, while also serving as a board-certified neurosurgeon at Carle Health. Her background and impressive credentials prepared her to contribute both clinically and through research at the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine. She earned her doctorate in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by post-doctoral work in computer vision and medical image analysis, and an MD degree from Yale before completing her medical residency in neurosurgery.
“To make real headway in health care and medicine, you have to have a foot in both the clinic and in research,” said Pappu, who maintains an active neurosurgical practice specializing in spine, trauma, and hydrocephalus.
At CI MED, Pappu has taken the lead on several research projects that leverage data analysis and engineering principles to solve real-world challenges in neuroscience and surgical practice. She’s worked with engineering students to design ergonomic devices to adapt surgery tools to better fit smaller hands, opening doors for more women to practice in neurosurgery, a field in which they are vastly underrepresented.
She’s also working on two new projects at CI MED that bridge the clinical and engineering research environments. One project seeks to engage the power of the 7T MRI scanner at Carle Foundation Hospital to map out the network of arteries and veins that supply blood and nutrients to the brain, and then use this high-resolution imaging to predict which aneurysms will rupture. Pappu and other members of CI MED’s strong collaborative community are involved in a second project that uses the power of artificial intelligence to quantitatively identify early signs of dementia.
Supporting students as they explore their varied individual interests is key, says Pappu, to sparking medical research and innovations that improve health care. She is working to expand CI MED’s research enterprise, connecting physician-innovators with experts who can help them tackle important unknowns in medicine. “I’ve been putting together a research pod based in the university to help the students find a clinical collaborator in the hospital. The bridge between them (clinical and campus researchers) is the medical students,” she explained. “We’re also working a little bit backward, so if a student wants to go into orthopedic surgery or pediatrics, we help identify which labs the student can work with,” she said.
Pappu is encouraged by an increasing number of CI MED students, including more women, who are interested in neurosurgery – a competitive and demanding specialty in which women make up only about 8.4% of practitioners in the U.S. Pappu says though the field doesn’t suit everyone, neurosurgery and neuroscience research offer rich opportunities for groundbreaking advances. “Neuroscience intersects with everything, and neurosurgery is a field that’s very open to innovation and technology, partly because the big problems are so rare that each time that you look, you see something new. Currently, the neural systems are the least understood, so that’s where there’s the most opportunity and the most excitement and scope in the field,” she said.
For Pappu, the opportunity to help advance CI MED’s research efforts is the culmination of her career experiences. “This was kind of my destiny, and to be in on the early time on this concept seemed like a perfect fit for me,” she said.