Michelle W. Sahli, PhD in Epidemiology with a background in teaching, research, combines a broad history of experiences with a passion for her craft to inspire her students and push them to make a difference in the world.
What do we know about Michelle Sahli?
Dr. Sahli is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Health Sciences. Dr. Sahli wasn’t a traditional student. As we know, many professors here in the United States go to high school, then college, then continue straight to a master’s degree and/or PhD. Some go on to a postdoctoral position and then directly into academia. Michelle Sahli’s story is quite different.
While she was in high school, she took part in a 10-day trip to France. During that trip she “fell in love with Paris” and found love in Paris and decided to leave high school and return to live there. Dr. Sahli lived in Paris for four years before deciding to come back to the US where she started working at a bank as a tax accountant. After having two children she left the bank and worked as a store manager for Toys R Us for 16 years. Towards the end of her career at this company there were a lot of changes in the way they did business, so she decided to go to college at 45 years old. It was her first time in college having earned her GED just after she came back from France almost 20 years before.
Dr. Sahli initially intended to go into chemistry and become a chemical engineer but, as many college students do, she changed her major and received her undergraduate degree in Environmental Issues from the CUNY Baccalaureate for the Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies at City University of New York. While in this program, she took a class in epidemiology and really liked it. It was then that she decided to obtain a master’s and a doctorate in Epidemiology.
Her research on her master’s degree focused on vitamin D and periodontal disease while her doctoral work was on nutritional factors and eye diseases, mainly eye disease of aging. Although she found looking at how diet can biologically be associated with disease interesting, what interested her even more was finding ways to do something with the knowledge gained. She began to ask herself, “If we found that diet is related to eyesight or to a disease, what can be done with this knowledge? How do we get people to change their diet so that they don’t get a disease?” That was when Dr. Sahli started examining communication between patients and healthcare providers.
Dr. Sahli, being trained as an epidemiologist, took part in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the university. For two years she ran the COVID-19 student case manager program where she had over 20 students reaching out to their fellow students who had COVID-19 or were at risk of having it due to symptoms or having had close contact with someone who had it. The case managers not only did contact tracing, they also followed up with their cases and provided them with information they needed to complete isolation and protect the health of the college community.
Now that the COVID-19 case management program has wound down and EHS has taken over responsibility for all potential COVID-19 cases, Dr. Sahli is currently working on get back to work in vision on a grant that she and her colleague at Michigan Technological Institute have with Michigan Health Endowment Fund. This research examines vision screening that can be done by a lay person, and specifically, in-home vision screening in older populations.
Why does Dr. Sahli work on topics related to vision?
“My PhD advisor had a grant and could fund me when I was a PhD student and she worked on vision, that’s the honest truth, like I probably wouldn’t have thought to study this at first, but when I started looking into it and working on it, I found vision interesting. As a PhD student we had limited resources and if somebody had a grant that could fund us it was better to work on that grant than to have to pay our own way through school. Plus, it enabled us to better learn by doing real epidemiological studies, not just ones from the textbooks.
The grant I’m currently working on is with a professor at Michigan Tech who was one of my fellow PhD students in Buffalo. It’s interesting research. It involves an app from a company called Peak Vision that makes software and hardware related to vision. The app we are using in our research is a visual acuity test, to test how well one sees. It’s an easy app that is downloaded on an Android phone and all you need to do is follow some easy directions to give someone a visual acuity test. But the cool thing about it is that, when a person does the vision test, you can then send receive a printout on which there are two pictures, one of the pictures will show how the person is seeing right now and the other will show how much better that person’s vision could be if they have their vision corrected. There have been several studies done using this app, but they focused on children and those studies were conducted in Kenya and India.”
Dr. Sahli states that, in the United States, when old people get screened by their primary care physician or a regular eye screening in the community, there often is not a good follow-up on those who screen poorly. It is not unusual for older people to use corrective lenses where the prescription was old and did not optimally correct their vision. The main question they’re attempting to answer is if in-home screening with this app will result in a higher uptake of people going to their optometrist after screening poorly for visual acuity. The grant seeks to do three things:
- Determine older adults’ vision needs and barriers to obtaining vision care by surveying the older population about their vision and other health-related questions
- Examining the possibility that stakeholders who work with older adults in their homes can assist in screening programs for these older adults, and those who may be homebound or reluctant to leave their homes.
- Conduct a pilot test of an in-home (or at least close to home) vision screening program using Peak Vision’s visual acuity app.
The biggest questions are:
How can we increase the number of people undergoing vision screening? And, perhaps just as important, how can we increase the number of people following up with an optometrist after a poor vision screening?
Are there any controversies regarding this topic? Is there any latest problem with eye disease that you facing while interested in the subject?
“Vision care is not a really controversial thing” but one problem Sahli and her colleague are looking at is access to healthcare, because it can be harder for old people to access this care. They are examining this issue in both a rural area and an urban area to understand the similarities and differences in the problems that people living in these types of areas face.”
Talking about eye disease related to diet, how do we change lifestyle factors?
Dr. Sahli’s first research study on eye disease and nutrition looked at lutein, a pigment found in green leafy vegetables, mostly collard greens and spinach. In investigating its association with diabetic retinopathy, she found that lutein can be protective against diabetic retinopathy, but you would probably have to eat about three pounds of spinach a week to derive a very small benefit. She states that “we do know that keeping one’s blood sugar under control has the greatest protective effect on diabetic retinopathy” but it is not known how best to get people to make the lifestyle changes needed to lower their HbA1c, a measure of blood sugar over time. And that’s the “burning question” to which she, and many health professionals, would like to find an answer.
How can you convince those reading your research that your findings are valid? How do you convince people to take part in this research?
”One needs to be transparent when presenting one’s findings. For example, a good researcher will acknowledge when there are limitations to their research. When someone not only speaks about the strengths of their research but how the findings might have been different if the study was done differently, this increases trust between the author and their readers.”
