She teaches students to solve crimes–and expand their horizons

During the summer, 2024, a group of high school students peered anxiously over a crime scene. They were in a part of Boston that’s densely populated with hospitals and research centers, a stone’s throw away from a street named after Louis Pasteur, the father of modern vaccination.

Before them was a body—the victim of the crime—and it was up to the students to figure out what happened. Had this person been poisoned? And if so, with what? Did they have any wounds? Could they explain the cause of death?

The body, it should be mentioned, was a medical training mannequin. And the students were part of a weeklong forensic investigations course run through Harvard Medical School’s MEDscience program, which offers unique biology courses for high school students.

While Harvard Medical School’s MEDscience program includes a variety of courses, each of which deals broadly with simulated medical emergencies, these students in particular were part of MEDscienceLAB Forensics—which Northeastern University student Aleena Jacob helped develop during her co-op with the HMS program.

“We want to bring forensics exposure to [the students],” Jacob says. She was curious how many high schoolers would be interested “not only in this idea of forensics medicine, but a window of what a career in it would be like,” she says.

Students in the forensics program visit a “crime scene,” gather evidence, interview witnesses, test and analyze samples in the laboratory, and work collaboratively to solve a criminal case. About a dozen high school students can participate in the weeklong session, and they’ll divide up the work to get to the bottom of the mystery—each testing different samples and running different tests. At the end, they make a final diagnosis. The process echoes those of many medical pathways: emergency medicine, medical examiners, and medical pathologists among them.

“A big part of the curriculum is when they actually get to step into the crime scene,” Jacob says. “They’re looking through the victim’s house and finding evidence. It’s somewhat similar to what I did when I worked as an EMT. I would go into a new setting and say, ‘OK, this patient doesn’t speak the same language as me. How can I figure out more about them?’”

Her EMT experience taught Jacob to keep a sharp eye out for other clues—medications that could indicate certain conditions, for example. “We teach the kids to go through a similar thing. They see crushed pills in the scene. What does that tell them? Was the patient drugged?”

Jacob, who is a senior in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, attended a MEDscience course at Harvard Medical School when she was in high school. This was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so Jacob participated virtually from her home in Connecticut. She was immediately hooked. When she moved to Boston for college, she volunteered with MEDscience whenever she could. At the beginning of 2024, she joined the team for six months as a co-op student, where she was trained as a teaching assistant and worked closely with students.

During her co-op, Jacob would meet on Fridays with Obi Onochie, director of the MEDscienceLAB and Forensics Program at HMS MEDscience. They started hammering out a curriculum, informed by Onochie’s extensive medical and educational training and Jacob’s experience in emergency medical technician courses. They launched the forensics program in the summer of 2023, gaining valuable insight about what was working—and what wasn’t—as they went along.

“Aleena has been involved with the MEDscience Forensics program from the very beginning,” Onochie says. “She helped create one of our first patient case scenarios, which helps students learn about the field of forensics toxicology. She’s helped us create pre- and post-program surveys that the students take and down the line, we’ll use the information from these surveys to publish a paper on the impact and efficacy of our work.”

Jacob was recognized among this year’s Women Who Empower Innovator Award winners. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding.

“Aleena is passionate about science, healthcare, and education and she brought this enthusiasm with her each day to work,” Onochie says. “She connected very well with our students and often gave them advice on how to choose colleges and majors, how to apply to schools, how to find outreach/internship opportunities outside of the classroom, how to manage stress, and much more. She understands the mission of our MEDscience program which is to mentor and inspire the next generation of diverse scientists.”

That mission aligns with Jacob’s values, too. She recalls watching her mother go back to school later in life, once she had immigrated from India to the U.S. She went to school while raising Jacob’s family, and now works as a respiratory therapist, “something she never thought she would do,” Jacob says. She hopes that the forensics program she helped create can be a similar entryway to a career in medicine—or another STEM field—for someone who may never have considered it before.

“Going in as a high schooler, I knew I was interested in science, but doing that program really opened my eyes. I realized how many careers I can go for in medicine, and that really started my journey of thinking about becoming a doctor, which I hope to become one day. This is a way of giving back to my high school self, and to other kids in my same position.”