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NCI All-Ireland Fellows Visit Lombardi

By Tomas Clarke

When the National Cancer Institute (NCI) All-Ireland postdoctoral fellows arrived at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, they were met by an array of patients painting, drawing, conversing, and smiling, as a piano melody floated through the lobby. This is the environment that the Lombardi Arts & Humanities Program seeks to create for patients and visitors.

After patients are diagnosed, they are often overwhelmed with the tests, appointments, and meetings with their various doctors. In short, there is a lot of time spent waiting. To combat this, the patients at Lombardi can take painting lessons from teachers like Nevin Bossart, a cancer survivor who now visits the cancer center twice a week to paint with patients, family, and medical caregivers. But painting is not the only thing that makes patients’ spirits rise. To help promote a more creative and productive response to the disease, patients who receive care at Lombardi can also participate in expressive writing workshops, visual art workshops, dance classes, view art exhibitions, and listen to a performance series by area musicians and dancers.

The NCI All-Ireland fellows visited Lombardi to learn more about this program. Each year research and clinical fellows from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland spend a summer working and learning the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. Georgetown University has strong ties to the NCI All-Ireland program, and so the fellows made the trek to Georgetown for an afternoon of science and art.

Robert Clarke, PhD, DSc, co-director of Lombardi's Breast Cancer Program, an alumnus of Queen’s University and a driver behind the partnership, was the first researcher to give his presentation after a quick introduction by Nancy Morgan, MA, Director of the Arts and Humanities Program, who organized the meeting. He was followed by Marc Schwartz, PhD, Christopher Loffredo, PhD, and Claudine Isaacs, MD, who all spoke of their work and Lombardi’s progress in the unrelenting fight against cancer.

Last to speak was Nevin Bossart, whose presentation gave the Irish fellows an opportunity to paint. As the meeting came to a close, the interns left the conference room uplifted. They exited out into the main lobby of the Lombardi clinic where they were met once again by a number of patients painting, drawing, conversing, and smiling. They left the building in a seemingly more uplifted mood.