Carla Pugh knew she would be a doctor practically before she knew what a doctor really was.
Growing up in Berkeley, California, she heard tales of both her mother’s and father’s family in the deep south in the 1930s, where a grandmother or great aunt delivered all the babies at home and tended to every other medical need — for both people and animals.
“They didn’t go to the hospital, they went to whoever was nearest to the farm who had the skills,” Pugh tells Madison365. “Both of my parents were born at home, and delivered by their grandmother or great aunt who’s the midwife, but she’s also the veterinarian for all the animals. I was like, ‘she’s superwoman.’ In my mind she was a physician. That’s what I wanted to do.”
“I was on a mission,” she says, a mission that took her from a pre-med degree at UC-Berkeley to medical school at Howard University in Washington, DC. It was there that she realized she wasn’t going to take the normal path to a normal medical career.
“I had such a passion for human anatomy and science that was different,” she says. “I was interested in the aesthetics of anatomy. I hated the anatomy books that they told us we had to buy. I’d go to the library and photocopy pictures from other books, and I’d make a collage that was better than the professor’s lecture notes, and everybody wanted my notes. And so as that evolved and continued on in other courses outside of anatomy, that’s when I knew I had a passion for education more broadly.”
That’s when she also knew she wasn’t going to specialize as a cranio-facial reconstructive surgeon, as she had decided in ninth grade.
“The face is really cool, all those muscles,” she says. “But then I wouldn’t get the exposure to the rest of human anatomy. I’d miss the intestines, the pancreas, the liver.”
Her passion for anatomy, blended with her passion for learning and education, led to what she calls her “second mission,” a PhD in education from Stanford.
“One of the first courses I took (at Stanford) was a course in human-computer interaction,” she says. “I was not expecting to learn about sensor technology. When I did, it was just so clear that this is something that can be helpful. That’s something that changed my career, branded my career.”
Pugh now holds several patents in sensor technology that helps medical schools evaluate the performance of medical students, residents and physicians in simulations.
“Everyone has seen some kind of simulator. You just don’t know that’s the name for it,” Pugh says, noting that if you’ve ever seen a CPR dummy, you’ve seen a simulation mannequin. Those simulation mannequins, also known as trainers, have provided practice for medical students and doctors for many years, but the only evaluation of the students’ performance has come from observation by instructors — which can be flawed and subjective. The sensors Pugh developed, which can be placed inside training mannequins or on the practitioner’s hands, help measure students’ performance and provide feedback even for seasoned veteran doctors.
The sensors also assist in development of haptic skills, meaning the skill of interpreting through the sense of touch — a critical skill for doctors of any kind.
“Internists, general family practitioners, OB/GYN, when they’re delivering that baby, and they’re trying to get the arm out, how do you know it’s the arm?” Pugh asks with a laugh. “They can’t see it right away, it’s all by touch. There’s a lot of information doctors carry around in their fingertips. How do you transfer that to a medical student or resident or junior faculty person who is advancing in their skills?”
You transfer it, Pugh thinks, through the use of sensors and feedback.
That will be the focus of her talk at the Wisconsin Science Festival’s “Big Ideas for Busy People” event at 7 pm on Saturday, October 22.
Her talk, entitled “Sensors, motion tracking and data science: The breakfast of champions,” will make the case (in five to seven minutes) that the medical profession could take a lesson from athletes.
“Look at athletes. They use data for mastery training, for Olympic training, for all their training,” she says. “It’s a different culture than what we have in the medical field. Our testing has been to say that you meet the minimum standards, and if you don’t, you can’t practice. It doesn’t make us excited about being tested. For athletes, they want to be tested. You come to practice, everybody’s got a stopwatch. You gotta know how fast you are. Body form, speed, all of those things are related and you can’t improve it without the feedback. We need the culture in the medical field to go from testing for minimum standards and it’s punitive, to doctors wanting to be tested because they want to be better than the last procedure they did. That’s my dream — to change the culture in the medical field, to add metrics for mastery as opposed to metrics for high-stakes testing.”
While the specific event where she’s speaking is geared toward adults, all ages are welcome, and the four-day Wisconsin Science Festival has something for everyone. Pugh is excited to be involved for the first time.
“I benefited from these kinds of venues when I was a kid. It motivates you, it inspires you,” she says.
And to those kids in attendance at the science festival, the five-year-olds with dreams of becoming doctors like Pugh, she says, “Do it. Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do it. Be a doctor, be a scientist, be whatever you want to be but don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it. Expect them to be there to tell you you can’t, especially if you’re a person of color. But don’t let them get to you.”
The rewards are many, she says.
“I’m completely unbiased but this is the best profession ever,” she says with a grin. “Most of the time I’m working really hard so I just work hard and enjoy it but there are other moments when I stop and realize I’m the luckiest person in the world to have this privilege to take care of people, but then to blend it with this crazy total geekfest career building simulators and working with engineers in my lab and gluing things together and buying arms and legs from the store. Like, come on, who does that?”
Not many people do, clearly, and one of the few is Carla Pugh, MD, PhD, right here in Madison.
The Wisconsin Science Festival runs October 20 – 23 at venues across the state. More information is available at https://www.wisconsinsciencefest.org/.
