When Jordan Kotch started studying disease and medicine at Lehigh, she didn’t think the topics would hit so close to home. Pursuing a dual degree in behavioral neuroscience and health, medicine, and society (HMS), with a minor in Asian studies, Kotch has a vast array of research experience—all of which is culminating in a deeply personal podcast about breast cancer.

During her first two years at Lehigh, Kotch researched how people interpret different concepts in Jessecae Marsh’s psychology lab. The Categorization and Casual Reasoning Lab researches how people’s beliefs influence the way they reason and make decisions. Kotch explored the psychology of language, investigating the causality between how people interpret words and how those interpretations shape their worldview. 

“We would look at connections between the words that they use and how they describe things to see how people interpret and view different concepts.” After coding responses and combing through data for patterns, she gained her first real insight into how cognitive theories translate into real-world beliefs. “It was also just a really good experience to learn the process of running trials.”

This first foray into research was followed by a six-week intensive biomedical research program at the Karolinska Institute, a renowned medical university in Solna, outside Stockholm, where Kotch spent the summer before her junior year. There, she developed wet lab skills including protein expression assays and CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), along with a range of other biomedical techniques.

The international environment was transformative. “I felt very honored to be able to talk to so many researchers who were from all over the world,” she says, noting that she fell in love with the country so much she eventually returned for a winter trip with her mom.

That international summer research soon gave way to hands-on clinical exposure back home through a St. Luke’s University Health Network externship. Rotating through six different hospital departments, Kotch found her stride shadowing doctors, citing the opportunity to observe live surgeries as a highlight of the experience.

By her senior year, she used her past research and externship experiences to inform two separate independent study projects. The first took an unexpected turn into media and culture, analyzing the popular animated television show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Despite it being marketed as a children’s show, the animated series appeals to a wide audience to this day, she notes.

“I wrote a series of essays on how (the episodes) connect to real life, spiritual practices, historical events, and political regimes within our world,” she explains. She used that cultural and historical investigation to understand, “how the show creators used that to create such an intense narrative and world that drew so many people in.”

Her second project was driven by a more personal catalyst: her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. Kotch wanted to both research and inform others about this often confusing and emotional disease so she landed on creating a podcast. “I talk about different things related to breast cancer and explain them in a way that's more accessible to people who might not have a medical background,” she explains.

She’s also incorporating her knowledge and experience from a course she took on traditional Chinese medicine , something her mom uses in tandem with her prescribed treatment. There are caveats to using some of these methods, but she hopes to highlight how different communities experience the same disease. “I think that's why HMS has been such a good major (because) it really teaches you how to look at medicine or science from another perspective or through a different lens.”

“I'm also part of Zeta Tal Alpha and our philanthropy is breast cancer. So I feel like I've had a lot of exposure to it and a lot of friends who also have had parents go through it,” she adds. 

Kotch wants to reach fellow college students who might be going through something similar to her so they will know they’re not alone. By connecting the psychology of navigating difficult circumstances plus her science background, she hopes it’ll make a difficult process easier.

Her education at Lehigh has made her a multifaceted learner, she says, thanks to her HMS major and Asian studies classes. “It's definitely such an important skill to be culturally aware and competent of how people's experiences can differ,” she says, “and how the same issues can be experienced differently by different communities.” 

“As much as I love neuroscience and learning the biology of everything, it's not the whole picture. So I feel like doing the interdisciplinary studies gave me this whole picture,” she says.

Kotch wants to bring this whole picture perspective to graduate school. As she prepares to apply to medical school this summer, Kotch plans to work as a medical assistant or clinical research coordinator, continuing the hands-on work she began as a student EMT.

As her time at Lehigh draws to a close, she’s proud of the community she has here on campus. Despite her vast array of clinical experiences, it’s her blending of science and the humanities that proves she will be a people first practitioner.