Fourteen-year-old Seham Kettaneh was the first of her family to jump into action when COVID-19 hit. “Seham was really concerned,” recalls her father, Hasan. She was asking, “How can we help the frontline heros? How can we help doctors as they attempt to save lives?'” With Hasan and his wife, Leena, both being researchers passionate about connecting people and data-driven decision-making, the natural suggestion they provided was that doctors perhaps could use some help in conducting clinical studies, collecting data and writing reports. Intrigued, Seham continued to ask questions. “How do we reach out to these doctors?” she wondered.
Seham created this poster that was shared on social media to recruit people for her initiative.
With friends and colleagues in the medical sector, Hasan connected Seham with physicians who saw the value of her idea and the potential it could have. With so many assessment centres, emergency departments and ICUs, doctors expressed a need for people to help them document their experiences and collect data. So she began recruiting volunteers, including her parents, in this pilot program to support doctors in their COVID-19 research. Soon, she found it difficult to manage and coordinate all the logistics through emails and phone calls.
So she got to work adding an extension to the digital platform her parents had created for a different project. Seham’s contribution aims to connect people from social sciences, humanities and psychology, and anyone who has qualitative and quantitative research skills, with physicians, doctors and hospitals conducting research and needing help. The platform creates a profile of researchers based on their skills and competencies to match them with research needing assistance. Most of these projects are done voluntarily, unless a budget is available. Though the current system is down right now due to upgrades in progress, it was working from March to July. Through her platform extension, Seham aims to continue to connect researchers and physicians to work together against COVID-19. “We were just supervising and part of the volunteer work,” says Hasan. Grateful, many have sent her thank you letters and updates on their progress. Hasan says she’s delighted that it has worked out so far and looks forward to growing the project!
We are proud to have Seham Kettaneh as a regular volunteer at our Science Rendezvous events who has also done so much to help combat COVID-19! But she is not the only one in the family who is part of the Science Rendezvous community and working to overcome the pandemic. Be sure to read more about the Kettaneh family’s Volunteer Story and stay tuned for more stories about the family’s passion to help others during this time!
