By Christina Frank
Michael Backman, RN, MSN, was pursuing a degree in speech pathology when he decided that nursing was his calling. “I was taking an anatomy and physiology course, and I fell in love with the body in its entirety and the science that made it all,” he says. “The field of nursing spoke to me.”
Backman, who was selected to represent the Class of 2025 as the MSN commencement speaker, is graduating with a Master of Science (MSN) in Nursing and will go on to Yale School of Nursing’s PhD program in the fall.
“As I was making my way through the MSN program here, I became fascinated with research and identifying gaps in the science,” he says.
In addition to working part-time as a registered nurse in a pediatric ENT clinic in New Haven, Backman complimented his studies by taking on assignments as research assistant to two YSN PhD candidates.
One project involved doing qualitative research on communication between parents and pediatric cancer patients as they were nearing the end of life. “It was such a rewarding experience getting to interview all of these parents who had recently lost their children to pediatric cancers,” Backman says. “We learned that parents want quite direct communication with compassion and empathy, not fluff or pandering language.”
He also worked with a research team to study the relationship between pediatric sleep patterns and social determinants of health. “We’re still exploring the data,” he says, “but we are certainly noticing differences in sleep quality based on socioeconomic backgrounds.”
Reflecting on his journey at YSN and his message to his peers, Backman emphasizes the impact of the COVID pandemic on the class of 2025. “We are the generation of providers who came into this work with a bit more understanding behind what healthcare looks like, having just come through a global pandemic,” he says. “We are the generation of providers who saw all of that, who saw the healthcare system in crisis and still responded with a ‘yes’ to wanting to make a positive impact in patients’ lives and to resolve some of the issues that currently exist within the healthcare system. I think that makes us quite a unique and stalwart generation of providers.”
His upcoming PhD research will explore how sleep-related data and large language models can be used to detect neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.