STEMM & Cancer Health Equity

09/16/2026

Connecting flight from ORD to NY.

09/14/2026

Started out first leg this morning from lga to ORD to get Michigan Tech. Leaving the house at 6 AM is tricky. And our plans left the airport at least 30 minutes late. Hope there is no problem with the connection thing flight.

09/04/2026

Dr. Manley was recently on the Manta Cares Patient From Hell to discuss and how it starts in the lab before you get to . Manta Cares is doing a phenomenal job helping patients.

The video is this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68vazEmsYgY

https://scheq.org/scheq-featured-on-manta-cares-patient-from-hell-podcast

Researchers studying lung cancer draw on more than 800 cell lines a...

09/03/2026

Our episode on the Manta Cares Patient from Hell podcast has recently dropped. Our discussion covered , clinical trials, advocacy, and surfing surgeries.

09/03/2026

We received a plaque in honor of our 3 year service on the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Advisory Panel on Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research. This was the merger of 2 separate panels more than a year ago.

We learned so much from all of the stakeholder groups. It is amazing how they keep this many people organized.

Dr. Manley's term as patient representative has officially ended this month. We look forward to continued support of research that might not otherwise get funded.

If you are interested in an advisory panel reach out.

09/03/2026

Curveballs in life can give one time to think while getting back up. The first book is coming out in September.

08/29/2026

Friday was about Patient Portals and if your clinician will respond. Tang et al. Just published a paper in JAMA Network Open where they looked at 3.6M portal message across 511K patients and their primary care providers. They found that race, education and Insurance type changed if you were likely to get a response. Length of messages, punctuation, saying the doctors first or last name, and tone contributed to these differences. So now patients have to navigate another invisible curriculum to get care.

08/26/2026

We say AI can expand healthcare access, but the question is: for whom?

A new npj Digital Medicine paper by Han et al. looked at how four large language models performed on physician licensing exam questions across languages. The researchers started with English and Chinese questions, translated them into Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Portuguese, and then measured whether the models could answer them correctly.

Compared with the English and Chinese baselines, accuracy declined 10.29% for Arabic, 7.24% for Bengali, and 4.64% for Hindi.

Interestingly, these are not obscure languages.

In essence, access to medical knowledge may become less reliable depending on the language used to ask the question.

There are many other low-resourced countries and languages with limited representation in the data behind these systems. We cannot assume that a model that performs well in English will perform equally well for everyone else.

08/22/2026

Saturday A new presentation at FENS suggested that those that speak multiple languages have 'younger' brains. It is interesting to ask does it keep multiplying at 5 or more languages?

08/21/2026

It was great to attend the Rise Circle Event. Lots of great nuggets and information. The grad students asked some great questions. There were also individuals that worked in social work and with groups.