Irena Komninakas ’26 (CLAS) would have thrown her family a curveball if she told them she planned to major in fine arts and become, say, a musician.

“That definitely would have been surprising,” the Easton native says. “I have no musical talent whatsoever. My family is very supportive of my sister, who is more interested in the arts and music at her college, but I’ve always been more into STEM and biology classes.”

So when she told them she’d like to become a doctor, taking a pre-med track by double majoring in molecular and cell biology and Spanish, they weren’t shocked. After all, her father is a doctor and she has other relatives who are physician assistants and occupational therapists.

What surprised even her, though, was not just undergraduate access to a clinical research study at UConn but the ability to run one on her own. That came thanks to her Introduction to Translational Research (MCB3100) class in fall 2024 and later on receipt of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) Award through the Office of Undergraduate Research.

Both put her at Connecticut Children’s hospital in Hartford for the better part of the last year, first as a research assistant on a more senior student’s project, then as the principal investigator of her own.

“The class and all the experiences that I’ve had at Connecticut Children’s have continued to shape my perspective on what being a physician is and what it can be like,” she says. “It’s shown me that it’s all about clinical care, the patients, and learning how to best treat them. But you can also do that by contributing to increased knowledge in your field too.”

Do Younger Parents Go Online First?

Komninakas was introduced to Connecticut Children’s emergency room in MCB3100 when she worked as a research assistant, so continuing there for her SURF project under the mentorship of Dr. Sharon Smith, a pediatric professor at the School of Medicine and faculty member at Connecticut Children’s, and doing the same kind of work – surveying parents – was a no-brainer.

Her study, “Information Seeking Behavior of Pediatric Patients in the CT Children’s Emergency Department,” sought to learn more about what resources parents used before deciding to visit the ER and whether their decision was influenced by those resources.

She asked parents of children under 18 if they talked with a physician, family member, or friend before making the trip. Did they solicit information in a Google search, or look up a symptom on a medical website, or get feedback on social media? She queried their level of trust in their child’s primary doctor and whether they felt it was a good relationship.

“That was partially to investigate if patients who had a better relationship with their physician were more likely to turn to their doctor first versus someone who doesn’t or someone who looked up online health information,” she says. “The hypothesis of the study was that younger parents would be more likely to use online health information and certain types of online health information as well.”

With just over 100 parents in the survey, Komninakas says drawing fixed conclusions is premature, but she has seen some patterns.

Parents who went online did so to check specific symptoms, and they were less worried about the situation than parents who contacted their doctor before visiting the ER.

“I don’t have enough data to say younger parents went straight to the emergency room when they were worried, but it was a very consistent trend that younger parents, likely with younger children, had higher rates of worry or anxiety,” she says. “High parental anxiety was also highly correlated with online searching for health information.”

First US Study in 10 Years, Only to Look at Social Media

During an unrelated volunteer opportunity at Burgdorf Health Center in Hartford, Komninakas says she noticed that many of its patients failed to show up for appointments and learned that oftentimes at health clinics, patients hold a certain level of distrust toward their provider.

“The conversations I had with the physicians at Burgdorf sparked my interest in patient-physician distrust and caused me to wonder where people were getting their medical health information from and how that’s changed over time,” she says.

“As many studies have shown, online information in general, and certainly social media, have a growing impact on how people make their decisions, how they’re thinking, and the things they consider,” she continues. “And when I started to look further, it was interesting that there were no studies in the last 10 years looking at pediatric online information seeking behavior of parents.”

International studies have been done, she noted, but the last U.S. study published about a decade ago looked only at online searches and hadn’t considered social media. That survey’s population also was different than the demographics at Connecticut Children’s, which has a large Hispanic patient population.

For Komninakas, Connecticut Children’s offered her the opportunity to use that Spanish double major and translate survey questions for patients who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to participate in her project because of a language barrier.

When she previously studied abroad in Granada, Spain, with Global Affairs’ Experiential Global Learning pre-med/allied health program, she developed and practiced her medical Spanish skills, she says, learning a glossary worth of medical terminology.

At Connecticut Children’s, she says she tapped that experience to help parents even outside her survey project, clearing up discharge instructions or clarifying what a doctor said.

“It’s been incredibly fulfilling for me,” she says of using her Spanish skills that way.

But the story of one patient, a 3-year-old who was born prematurely and is coping with several chronic conditions, is the one that tugs at her heart. Komninakas says that while administering the survey she heard the mother’s birth story, learned about the moment she and the father were told of the child’s conditions, and how the boy is doing today.

And on the survey, the parents were firm on not looking at online health information because it only predicted the boy’s death at every step in his growth to date. Today, the toddler has outlived those online expectations, so for this family, online sleuthing proves to be just a harbinger of bad news.

But, Komninakas says, there were some instances she witnessed when parents perhaps could have benefited from checking out information online. A search of “sore throat,” for instance, could have more appropriately shifted a patient toward urgent care rather than the ER for a strep throat diagnosis.

Nonetheless, “The future of AI sounds like it will change a lot and would affect the results of this study,” she acknowledges. “I think as a lot of AI resources become more informed, more advanced, parents may feel more comfortable using online AI resources than they do using a generic search engine. AI is an interactive tool and can take into account your specific situation. It’s only going to get better and more trustworthy.”

Komninakas says that while she averaged 40 hours a week at the hospital over the summer, she’s continuing the project this semester, now as a senior student with her own research assistants. She also plans to present the project at the 13th annual Fall Frontiers poster exhibition on Oct. 23.

So, in the same way music oftentimes comes full circle at the beginning and end of a song, Komninakas in her undergraduate research has as well.