Pipelines to Leadership: Strategies for Executive Board Recruitment at a Student-Run Free Clinic

Introduction/Problem: The Covid-19 pandemic placed restrictions on student-run free clinics (SRFCs) across the nation. Guidelines set forth by our medical school’s administration restricted in-person participation at our SRFC from April 2020 to March 2021 for clinical students and April 2020 to September 2021 for pre-clinical students. With medical executive board elections occurring annually in October, it was uncertain whether eligible pre-clinical students would feel confident enough in their experience to run for and fulfill the responsibilities of a board position. In this paper, we will present leadership opportunities and strategies to recruit candidates for an executive board at an SRFC. Methods/Interventions: Additional volunteer positions, including a new Assistant Clinic Manager position, were added for pre-clinical students prior to the election. Members of the clinic’s established teams, such as the Continuity of Care Team, were encouraged to run in the election. An additional board position was transitioned to a two-year position. The current board members participated in a question and answer session about their positions and informally mentored interested candidates outside of this session. Candidates’ written platforms and volunteer sign-up records were analyzed to determine the impact of these interventions. Results: Twenty-seven candidates ran for 14 board positions up for election. Fifty-six percent of the candidates were pre-clinical students, of which 47% had the opportunity to serve in the Assistant Clinic Manager position. Eighty-five percent of candidates were members of one of the clinic’s teams, and 100% of the candidates elected had previously served on a team or as a board member, which are higher percentages than in previous years. Conclusion: Despite pre-clinical students eligible to run for a board position given the opportunity of only 7 clinic days over 2 months (with a limit of one general volunteer shift per month) to serve in-person, the election attracted a similar number of candidates as previous years. In addition, candidates’ motivation to improve upon things they had been involved with at the clinic, often beyond their responsibilities on clinic day, played a large role in the 2021 election. While a variety of methods can be used to motivate volunteers to pursue executive board positions, our work shows SRFCs can offer leadership positions outside of the executive board, possibly through clinic teams, to serve as a pipeline for volunteers to pursue increasing clinic ownership and responsibilities

Contrasting multilevel relationships between behavior and body mass in blue tit nestlings

Repeatable behaviors (i.e., animal personality) are pervasive in the animal kingdom and various mechanisms have been proposed to explain their existence. Genetic and nongenetic mechanisms, which can be equally important, predict correlations between behavior and body mass on different levels (e.g., genetic and environmental) of variation. We investigated multilevel relationships between body mass measured on weeks 1, 2, and 3 and three behavioral responses to handling, measured on week 3, which form a behavioral syndrome in wild blue tit nestlings. Using 1 years of data and quantitative genetic models, we find that all behaviors and body mass on week 3 are heritable (h(2) = 0.18-0.231 and genetically correlated, whereas earlier body masses are not heritable. We also find evidence for environmental correlations between body masses and behaviors. Interestingly, these environmental correlations have different signs for early and late body masses. Altogether, these findings indicate genetic integration between body mass and behavior and illustrate the impacts of early environmental factors and environmentally mediated growth trajectory on behaviors expressed later in life. This study, therefore, suggests that the relationship between personality and body mass in developing individuals is due to various underlying mechanisms, which can have opposing effects. Future research on the link between behavior and body mass would benefit from considering these multiple mechanisms simultaneously

Exploratory behavior undergoes genotype-age interactions in a wild bird

Animal personality traits are often heritable and plastic at the same time. Indeed, behaviors that reflect an individual's personality can respond to environmental factors or change with age. To date, little is known regarding personality changes during a wild animals' lifetime and even less about stability in heritability of behavior across ages. In this study, we investigated age-related changes in the mean and in the additive genetic variance of exploratory behavior, a commonly used measure of animal personality, in a wild population of great tits. Heritability of exploration is reduced in adults compared to juveniles, with a low genetic correlation across these age classes. A random regression animal model confirmed the occurrence of genotype-age interactions (GxA) in exploration, causing a decrease in additive genetic variance before individuals become 1 year old, and a decline in cross-age genetic correlations between young and increasingly old individuals. Of the few studies investigating GxA in behaviors, this study provides rare evidence for this phenomenon in an extensively studied behavior. We indeed demonstrate that heritability and cross-age genetic correlations in this behavior are not stable over an individual's lifetime, which can affect its potential response to selection. Because GxA is likely to be common in behaviors and have consequences for our understanding of the evolution of animal personality, more attention should be turned to this phenomenon in the future work

Fostering Leadership in a Student-Run Free Clinic Medical Executive Board and Across Interdisciplinary Partners.

Background: Being a member of a healthcare executive board requires a unique sense of resolve and passion for service. Not only are these leaders operating a student-run free clinic, but they are also full-time professional students while balancing extracurricular activities to discern their healthcare vocation. Board members feel pulled in many directions, resulting in imposter syndrome and possibly untapped leadership potential. Leadership succumbing to this pressure in 2021 might have resulted in the permanent closure or dysfunction of a clinic after COVID-19 required closure for one year. This study will discuss the interventions employed by the clinic’s Chair, Vice-Chair, Women’s Health co-chairs, and Operations chair to overcome the burden felt when faced with reopening a large, interdisciplinary, free clinic serving approximately 34 patients per weekly clinic day. Though fostering interpersonal relationships best encompasses the theme with which the above leaders encouraged hope during a time of global suffering, relationships were encouraged through multiple discrete interventions forming camaraderie and trust within and between interdisciplinary executive boards. Interventions: Medical Executive Board: In anticipation of the added pressures of reopening the clinic amid COVID-19, the Chair took special care to create a culture of collegiality and mutual vulnerability by facilitating various ways to ‘check-in’ with her board. She hosted preterm and midterm check-ins with each leader to discuss their vision for their role on the board. The Chair and Chair-elect also hosted the clinic’s first annual leadership retreat to support each member in finding their leadership style, and in turn, becoming familiar with their colleagues’ leadership styles. The Chair and Chair-elect will also perform exit interviews with all graduating board members. Partners: Reopening during the pandemic meant reorganizing the entire clinic flow and limiting the number of volunteers present. As a result, many interdisciplinary partners could not participate in the initial reopening and had to be brought in slowly throughout the year. Partner participation was encouraged by monthly meetings with all partners (regardless of clinical presence), and an active group chat with leaders. The Vice-Chair also emphasized alternate means of participation. Some partners organized winter clothes and food drives, while others fundraised for the clinic. All partners were encouraged to develop telehealth plans. The fall partners’ retreat fostered community, during which all partners brainstormed 2022 goals. Results/Conclusion: Medical Executive Board: As a result of the above interventions, clinic leadership not only reopened the free clinic but fulfilled many years-long goals, which include rolling out a weekday telehealth protocol, serving record numbers of patients during a time of immense need, publishing the inaugural clinic-wide monthly newsletter, and formulating the clinic’s first-ever mistreatment policy. The leadership retreat inspired our Women’s Health Coalition to host a retreat; a check-in with the Women’s Health chair led to a midterm co-chair election to sustain the coalition long-term. Finally, the Operations chair spearheaded changes to clinic flow to avoid COVID-19 outbreaks–in doing so, she inspired a record turnout for this position at the 2022 elections. Partners: By the end of 2021, all interdisciplinary partners had resumed in-person care. However, the regular monthly meetings, alternate projects, and retreats fostered community and interest in the clinics even when all could not physically participate

A statistical methodology for estimating assortative mating for phenotypic traits that are labile or measured with error

Assortative mating in wild populations is commonly reported as the correlation between males’ and females’ phenotypes across mated pairs. Theories of partner selection and quantitative genetics assume that phenotypic resemblance of partners captures associations in “intrinsically determined” trait values. However, when considering traits with a repeatability below one (labile traits or traits measured with error), the correlation between phenotypes of paired individuals can arise from shared environmental effects on the phenotypes of paired individuals or correlated measurement error.We introduce statistical approaches to estimate assortative mating in labile traits or traits measured with error in the presence of shared environmental effects. These approaches include (1) the correlation between the mean phenotypes of males and females, (2) the correlation between randomized values of individuals and (3) the between-pair correlation derived from a bivariate mixed model.We use simulations to show that the performance of these different approaches depends on the number of repeated measures within individuals or pairs, which is determined by study design, and rates of survival and divorce.We conclude that short-term environmental effects on phenotypes of paired individuals likely inflate estimates of assortative mating when not statistically accounted for. Our approach allows investigation of this important issue in assortative mating studies for labile traits (e.g. behaviour, physiology, or metabolism) in both socially monogamous and other mating systems, and groupings of individuals outside a mating context.</ol

Data from: Shared environmental effects bias phenotypic estimates of assortative mating in a wild bird

Assortative mating is pervasive in wild populations and commonly described as a positive correlation between the phenotypes of males and females across mated pairs. This correlation is often assumed to reflect non-random mate choice based on phenotypic similarity. However, phenotypic resemblance between mates can also arise when their traits respond plastically to a shared environmental effect creating a (within-pair) residual correlation in traits. Using long-term data collected in pairs of wild blue tits and a covariance partitioning approach, we empirically demonstrate that such residual covariance indeed exists and can generate phenotypic correlations (or mask assortative mating) in behavioural and morphometric traits. These findings i) imply that residual covariance is likely to be common and bias phenotypic estimates of assortative mating, which can have consequences for evolutionary predictions, ii) call for the use of rigorous statistical approaches in the study of assortative mating, and iii) show the applicability of one of these approaches in a common study system

Data from: A strong genetic correlation underlying a behavioural syndrome disappears during development because of genotype-age interactions

In animal populations, as in humans, behavioural differences between individuals that are consistent over time and across contexts are considered to reflect personality, and suites of correlated behaviours expressed by individuals are known as behavioural syndromes. Lifelong stability of behavioural syndromes is often assumed, either implicitly or explicitly. Here, we use a quantitative genetic approach to study the developmental stability of a behavioural syndrome in a wild population of blue tits. We find that a behavioural syndrome formed by a strong genetic correlation of two personality traits in nestlings disappears in adults, and we demonstrate that genotype–age interaction is the likely mechanism underlying this change during development. A behavioural syndrome may hence change during organismal development, even when personality traits seem to be strongly physiologically or functionally linked in one age group. We outline how such developmental plasticity has important ramifications for understanding the mechanistic basis as well as the evolutionary consequences of behavioural syndromes

Morphometric and behavioural data collected in blue tit pairs (7 traits)

Data collected in a wild population blue tits breeding in South-western Finland between 2003 and 2017. The names of males' and females' traits end, respectively with "_m" and "_f". Wing, tarsus, head-bill (Head) and tail lengths are in mm and weight is in g. Handling aggression (Aggression) is on a 1-5 scale and breath rate (BR) is expressed as a number of breaths per second. The birds' age at the time of measurement is in years

Defence data collected in wild blue tits

Behavioural data collected from 2007 to 2017 in a wild population of blue tits breeding in South-western Finland. The number of times males and females attacked an observer during a 2 minutes test is reported, respectively in the columns"Nr_attacks_m" and "Nr_attacks_f". The square root of this number ("Attacks_m" and "Attacks_f".) was used for our analyses.The birds' age at the time of measurement is in years