Caring for kids with cancer at St. Jude
Northeastern student was only nurse researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s competitive summer program.
For Aishah Daiyan, the opportunity to work with pediatric cancer patients in the oncology program at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, was a defining moment.
“It was definitely life-changing,” she said this fall.
The only nursing student in a famed summer education program, Daiyan described the experience as everything she hoped for, and more.
Daiyan conducted research, spent a day in the operating room observing surgeons at work and shadowed a nurse practitioner on her rounds.
“I loved that because I want to go on to be a nurse practitioner in the future,” the fourth-year Northeastern student said. “I got to meet cancer patients and their families and get to know them.”
The level of mentorship was extraordinarily high, with each student participating in the Pediatric Oncology Education (POE) program being assigned a principal investigator as a research project guide.
“It was very individualized… an awesome program,” Daiyan said.
Her manuscript on sleep duration patterns in newly diagnosed child patients was one of three to receive honorable mention at the program’s end, said Belinda Mandrell, Daiyan’s principal investigator and director of nursing research at St. Jude, which specializes in treating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
“That’s pretty significant. You are talking about some of the most stellar students in the country,” Mandrell said.
The Northeastern connection
The POE program at St. Jude is highly competitive, with 400 to 500 students vying for 50 spots.
Daiyan found out about the program during a co-op at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where she still works part-time.
“There were several rounds of interviews,” she said, noting that she had to submit multiple letters of recommendation. “I applied in November and heard back in February so it was a months-long process. It was definitely worth it.”
Daiyan impressed the program’s directors with her GPA, interview and interest in working with biostatisticians and other team members involved in producing research, Mandrell said.
“I really admired that about her,” Mandrell said, adding that it’s not every year that a nursing student joins the pre-med, graduate, medical and other students in the program.
Nursing research
The opportunity to do research was too good to pass up, Daiyan said. “Typically when you think of nursing it’s a clinical, bedside type of job.”
Mandrell explained that nursing research tends to be more patient-focused, more of “a social science … where we really look at improving the patient experience.”
For her research, Daiyan studied sleep patterns among patients newly diagnosed with a type of malignant brain tumor called a medulloblastoma.
Studies show people with a lot of sleep duration variability in adolescence are more likely to develop cardiometabolic health risks later on in life, Daiyan said.
The St. Jude study subjects, who averaged 11 years of age, exhibited greater sleep variability than a comparison set of 13 to 18 year olds in the general population, putting them “more at risk for heart disease and other cardiometabolic diseases later on at a younger age compared to the general population,” Daiyan explained.
Working with a team of Ph.D-level biostatisticians on establishing sample sizes and analyzing results for her paper was intimidating but empowering, Daiyan said. “I was the youngest person in these meetings.”
Daiyan returned to Memphis in October to present her paper at a weekend conference at St. Jude, courtesy of the research hospital.
The St. Jude experience
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Founded by entertainer and humanitarian Danny Thomas, St. Jude is famous not only for its care of pediatric cancer patients and research programs but also for never charging patient families for treatment, food or housing.
The donor-funded hospital and research facility employs a concierge to attend to needs of families and has closets full of new toys on all the units.
Still, the fact is the hospital is full of sick children fighting for their lives, including babies, some of whom have barely had a healthy day.
Daiyan said she thrived on her experience in the operating room, witnessing surgeries and the placement of ports, a permanent device to offer access to a vein for chemotherapy. But she was struck by the small size of many of the patients.
Dealing with children means that “parents kind of become your patients, too,” she said. “It was a very special thing to be part of the healing team and to be able to provide support to people.”
Co-op at Brigham and Women’s
Since the POE program only lasted three months this summer, Daiyan is fulfilling her co-op commitment with a stint at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she is undertaking similar duties to her part-time job at Dana-Farber.
“I love being in the emergency room and then the ICU the next day,” Daiyan says. “I get to see everything.”
Daiyan said her experience at St. Jude and her co-ops in Boston have cemented her decision to go to graduate school to become a nurse practitioner after finishing up at Northeastern in May of 2027.
“I definitely want to go into oncology,” she said. “There is a lot of research that goes on in oncology and so much new medicine and treatment comes out of it. I love being a part of every step in someone’s treatment.”
