Daniel Kaufman of Brodheadsville was among the master of biomedical sciences students at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine who attended and presented research at the Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pain & Addiction Summit 2019: Putting People First.

The daylong conference examined the current state of the opioid crisis in Pennsylvania.

Kristin Feickert and Jaclyn Podd served as first authors, organizers and coordinators of the poster presentation at the conference. The end result was a group class poster from the MBS Community Health Research Class. They presented the joint poster with Ali Varano, Eric Ligotski, Laura Loeser, Daniel Kaufman, Janna Leppo and Asawer Nihal. The research presented was titled, “Trends in Acquisition/Distribution of Opioids and Mortality Rates.”

The authors said their MBS class examined opioid use and opioid-related deaths from several different angles in their Community Health Research course.

With a better understanding of patterns of use and opioid related deaths, public policy may be shaped to mitigate the worst outcomes of the opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania and nationally, the students’ research showed.