The Rutgers School of Graduate Studies has named SC&I Ph.D. Candidate Allyson Bontempo the recipient of a 2024 Excellence in Outreach and Service Award. The award “recognizes SGS graduate students who have made significant contributions to organizations outside Rutgers University.”
Award criteria includes “sustained, extraordinary commitment to service outside of Rutgers University, and effective collaboration with and meaningful connection to a service group, school, non-profit, or other community organization.”
The university will present a commemorative plaque to Bontempo at an Awards Ceremony on Thursday, May 9.
The SGS Awards Committee wrote to Bontempo, “The review committee that evaluated the applications said the quality of the nominees was especially high this year. You should be very proud of your accomplishments!”
"Award criteria includes “sustained, extraordinary commitment to service outside of Rutgers University, and effective collaboration with and meaningful connection to a service group, school, non-profit, or other community organization.”
Crediting her Ph.D. advisor Associate Professor of Communication Lisa Mikesell for providing her with invaluable support, Bontempo said, "This award would not be possible without Lisa. Lisa has been incredibly selfless in allowing me to pursue my own program of research and even working with me on some of these projects, even prior to having tenure, a time when she should have been focusing on her own work/publications. I appreciate her selflessness and trust in me as I began a program of research that I am passionate about and that has allowed me to provide outreach and service to patients with endometriosis."
Describing Bontempo's contributions to the field and the Rutgers and SC&I communities, Mikesell said, "While I am continually impressed by Allyson’s scholarship, her dedication to her peers, the community and health organizations she has partnered with, the patients who have been involved in her research, and her students is just as impressive. Allyson was one of our most active graduate students, helping to create a sense of strong community and always volunteering to help new graduate students acclimate to their first semester in the program and help continuing graduate students navigate challenges of academic and graduate student life.
"Allyson also cares deeply for her work and for the participants and patients who have inspired her. She embodies the values of participatory research and has consistently provided accessible outlets (e.g., listservs, short reports, webinars) to share research findings with the participants involved in her research. Although these efforts are especially time-consuming for doctoral students, who are already under a considerable amount of stress, she has always prioritized the patients participating in her studies and has made sure to take the time to keep them informed on how their participation has contributed to important findings.
"She has also been generous with sharing her data with other doctoral candidates in other programs who have been inspired by her approach and her findings. Last year, for example, a doctoral student in epidemiology reached out to her because her paper on patient perceptions on misdiagnosis with endometriosis reshaped how she was approaching her own research and asked if Allyson would mind meeting to share her thinking. This epidemiology student then contacted me to let me know, as Allyson’s advisor, that “[w]orking with Allyson has been an absolute dream. I am so excited to have met her and hope I can pass on the generosity she has shown. Her paper on endometriosis misdiagnosis has had a huge impact on my own work.” This is remarkable praise and recognition for someone who was at the doctoral stage of her career. Now, as a postdoc she continues to embody these values and generosity.
"Similarly, Allyson is extraordinarily caring toward and generous with her students. She has been teaching as a stand-alone instructor for several years and I’m continually impressed with the level of engagement and understanding she showed students. A few years ago, our Dean of Programs highlighted Allyson’s use of “mental health check-ins,” a practice she implemented in her courses to demonstrate caring and provide a space to check in on students and allow them to express concerns, as a practice others might consider adopting."
Bontempo’s interests and research focus on improving patient experience. Her work targets three areas crucial to patient experience: diagnostic error, the patient-clinician relationship, and patient support networks including online communities. Her work seeks to better understand how patient relationships with clinicians work in concert with patients' broader support networks outside of the healthcare system to shape the patient experience, particularly around issues of diagnosis.
Bontempo's Ph.D. advisor Associate Professor of Communication Lisa Mikesell, said, "While I am continually impressed by Allyson’s scholarship, her dedication to her peers, the community and health organizations she has partnered with, the patients who have been involved in her research, and her students is just as impressive.
The frameworks from which she pulls to understand the patient experience as shaped by the patient-clinician relationship during the diagnostic process are invalidation, trust, and clinician uncertainty (particularly, how these three frameworks intersect). Diagnostic contexts in which she is most interested are difficult-to-diagnose and contested health conditions. Her most recent work focuses on patients with endometriosis.
“More than anything, winning this award acknowledges to me that others see value in the work I do with patients with endometriosis,” Bontempo said. “This is particularly meaningful because despite affecting 10% of cisgender females and accounting for up to 50% of cases of infertility, endometriosis is a medically marginalized disease that no one really talks about and that takes, on average, 8-11 years to diagnose. So, I'm glad others, even if it was just the review committee, see value in improving the healthcare interactions of patients with endometriosis.”
Learn more about the Ph.D. Program at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.
Photos: Courtesy of Allyson Bontempo
