This summer, three generations of Honors College experience converged at Mayo Clinic, one of the nation’s leading institutions for medical care and research.
Marguerite Robinson was one of the first Oregon State University Honors College graduates, receiving an H.B.S. in biochemistry and biophysics and a certificate in applied ethics in 1998. She has gone on to become program manager of Mayo Clinic’s Biomedical Ethics Research Program. Her love of bioethics began in the Honors College, where she was introduced to Dr. Courtney Campbell who is now the Hundere Professor in Religion and Culture in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion and who, in the early 1990s, had begun developing an assortment of multidisciplinary undergraduate certificate programs which include applied ethics and medical humanities, among others.
Marguerite joined the Honors College as a sophomore when it was established in 1995. “That year, I took an honors ethics course and fell in love with the topic. As a biochemistry major, looking at ethics through the lens of science and medicine really excited me. When the professor, Lani Roberts, heard I was interested in bioethics, she said, ‘You have to meet Courtney.’”
Examining the intersections of science, medicine and ethics has defined Dr. Courtney Campbell’s illustrious career. In his classroom, Marguerite took courses such as Biomedical Ethics and Death and Dying. Under his mentorship, she completed her honors thesis on physicians’ responsibilities with respect to domestic violence intervention, a topic suggested by Dr. Campbell to tie her bioethical interests to her volunteer involvement with CARDV (the Corvallis Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence). Marguerite was Campbell’s first honors mentee – the first of many. Campbell has gone on to mentor more honors theses than any other faculty member, nearly 50 and counting.
Three decades later, Marguerite has earned an M.A.R. in ethics from Yale Divinity School and an M.A. in biotechnology from Columbia University and has spent nearly 19 years developing the biomedical ethics program at Mayo Clinic into a thriving center for research, learning and innovation. Under her founding management, the program has come to boast robust internship opportunities for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students. Dr. Campbell advertises these opportunities through the OSU medical humanities program, and in fall 2022, a recruitment flyer caught the eye of then-junior honors student Lindsay Beaman.
While applying, Lindsay took Campbell’s biomedical ethics course. “He pushed me to ask difficult questions and critically analyze my own perspectives,” she reflects. Campbell also served on Lindsay’s thesis committee, becoming a mentor to her in a similar capacity as he was once mentor to Marguerite. Both honors alumni share an inquisitive nature and a propensity toward “always trying to understand other perspectives, how to look at lived experiences and what they might tell you about what’s right and wrong,” as Marguerite puts it while describing the throughline approach that has guided her work over the years. Speaking with respect to Lindsay, Campbell echoes this: “She’s not satisfied with textbook answers. She wants to dig.” He credits these qualities for Lindsay’s success in securing the summer internship with Mayo Clinic in 2023 and in now going on to a post-bac research assistantship where she’ll continue probing bioethical issues under the supervision of Marguerite and her team.
“So much of biomedical ethics involves navigating ambiguity,” Lindsay says. “I remember being really uncomfortable with ambiguity when I first started the medical humanities certificate. I thought, ‘No, there has to be a right answer.’ But that’s not true. I’ve learned this through the certificate program,” she says, adding that now it’s also a reality she confronts in both research and shadowing experiences at Mayo Clinic. “I’m learning to deal with ambiguity in real time, pretty much all the time.”
“We give our interns a very unique, immersive experience,” says Marguerite. Looking at the research program as a whole, she highlights the growth of its training programs for undergrads and post-bacs as a point of pride, iterating the value of learning to apply bioethics skills, as Lindsay says, “in real time.”
“As an atmosphere to conduct bioethics, having the reality of seeing patients and their caregivers and working with physicians makes it seem worthwhile,” says Marguerite. “And it provides our trainees an experience where they not only learn bioethics research methods and work under bioethics researchers, but they also shadow in clinical areas, seeing all sorts of things they wouldn’t otherwise get to see.”
As a post-bac, Lindsay is working remotely from Corvallis, with plans to move to Rochester and an in-person format in January 2025. For now, she reflects on clinical encounters from last summer. “Shadowing in various specialties revealed many ways to practice empathetic, trauma-informed care while working through a lens of health justice,” she reports. Seeing bioethics skills, such as engaging difficult questions and sitting with complexity, manifest in clinical practice “resonates” with her. “I try to be intentional in learning from leaders that align with the type of future physician-scientist I want to be: someone who fiercely advocates for patients and centers their unique needs and experiences. All my mentors at Mayo reflect this.”
As a mentor, Marguerite inspires her younger fellow alum to continue striving toward interdisciplinary passions – just like her mentor did in the Honors College. “To me, and as a mentor to Lindsay, Marguerite is the poster child of integrating personal and academic interests,” says Campbell. “She’s a wonderful exemplar of following your passions, and if you do, doors will open for you.”