Former Competitive Swimmer Pursues Sports Medicine and Med School

Hagar Elgendy-Peerman first considered a career in medicine as a youth watching her mother assist others. The family lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and her mother was a pharmacist.

"I used to go with her to the clinic and shadow her as a child,” says Elgendy-Peerman. "I remember days when some people would come in and they would not be able to afford the medicine and I remember my mom covering their expenses. Things like that stayed with me throughout my life.”

Elgendy-Peerman, 25, is one of 175 first-year medical students in the Class of 2019 in the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine. She is wrapping up a week of orientation on the medical campus and will start her first official week of studies Monday, Aug. 10.

During orientation students completed mini-sessions with faculty to discuss med school curriculum, understand the importance of learning communities during their education and tour the college’s cadaver lab where they met their first real patient.

"I loved it. I have been meaning to get back in an anatomy lab for a few years,” says Elgendy-Peerman, who was paired with a group of five students who will spend the next year learning gross anatomy with a cadaver.

Their first assignment was to view the head of the cadaver—all are clean shaven whether male or female—and determine the sex of the individual before looking at other parts of the body to determine age and cause of death. The session was facilitated by medical education faculty members, Bruce Giffin, PhD, David Pettigrew, PhD, Donald James Lowrie, PhD, and Laurah Lukin, PhD.

Elgendy-Peerman acknowledges her team has a bit of a learning curve to conquer.

"We recognized it was a female, but we were entirely off on the age,” says Elgendy-Peerman. "We thought she was 68 and she was more like 90. Other than that, we were also wrong as well on the cause of death, but that’s OK—it’s a learning, but humbling, experience.”

Her entering class is among UC’s brightest, with an average undergraduate GPA of 3.73, just a hundredth of a point behind last year’s cohort, and an MCAT score of 33. It’s also diverse with the college’s largest percentage of women in med school—51 percent of the class—and underrepresented minorities accounting for 13 percent. Forty percent of the incoming students are residents of states other than Ohio, while 60 percent are Ohio residents. In total, this year’s class represents 21 states.

"When I finished high school and went to college I realized I have a love and a passion for medicine,” says Elgendy-Peerman.

That longing for medicine was also paired with her desire to excel as an athlete.

Elgendy-Peerman had been a competitive swimmer as youth, posting top times in the 50 freestyle for her age group in Egypt. She moved with her family to Seaside, California, where she was a 14-time all-league champion at Monterey High School.

She helped lead her team to a sectional championship as a senior, finished as finalist in the 50 freestyle and was named a Scholastic All-American. She continued her competitive swimming career at the University of Miami and Tulane University and also swam for the Egyptian national team, becoming a two-time national champ.

There were also interests outside of the pool for Elgendy-Peerman.

While a junior at Tulane, Elgendy-Peerman became involved in the NFL Neurological Care Program and developed an interest in concussion research. She continued to pursue work in this area after deciding to move from New Orleans to Cincinnati two years ago.

Elgendy-Peerman says the move to the Queen City seemed like the right fit for her and her husband—Cedric Peerman, a running back for the Cincinnati Bengals—and that UC’s Division of Sports Medicine held a special attraction.

She was able to continue her work with sports concussion research by serving as education and research coordinator in the Division of Sports Medicine. Elgendy-Peerman worked closely with two mentors, Joe Clark, PhD, professor of neurology, and Jon Divine, MD, medical director for UC Athletics and professor of orthopaedic surgery.

She was primarily responsible for helping to teach UC athletes and athletes at three Cincinnati-area high schools about concussion prevention
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"We actually vision train the athletes because we notice that if you increase the peripheral vision the athletes are less likely to be injured on the field,” explains Elgendy-Peerman. "We go out there two or three times a week to train those athletes and track their injuries throughout the season.”

Elgendy-Peerman was a co-author of an article in the Journal of Visualized Experiments about vision training methods for sports concussion mitigation and management. She hopes to be an orthopaedic surgeon in the future.