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When Robert Cotter, 27, heard about an opportunity for medical students to gain clinical and research experience at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, he jumped at the chance.
The six-week externship is sponsored by the Northwestern University department of physical medicine & rehabilitation.
“At the end of my sophomore year of undergrad, my younger brother, Will, suffered a spinal cord injury in a diving accident. He broke his neck and was immediately paralyzed from the chest down,” says Cotter, a medical student at Yale. “That really sparked my interest specifically in spinal cord injury research. Everything came full circle when I got the opportunity to come to Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and get involved in spinal cord injury rehabilitation through the externship program.”
For the clinical component of the program, Cotter worked with patients with medically complex conditions and people with spinal cord injury at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab for rehabilitation.
For the research component, Cotter chose to join a project related to mental health and spinal cord injury led by Allen Heinemann, PhD, director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research. The research, funded by the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, included a systematic review of interventions for depression for people with spinal cord injury. Cotter helped lead the screening process, evaluating hundreds of papers for quality, risk and bias and other factors.
“Robert brought an incredible energy and enthusiasm to the team’s systematic review of depression interventions, and it was evident that his brother’s experience contributed to his interest in the topic,” says Heinemann. “He was instrumental in helping us sort through over a thousand references to select those that were relevant and of high quality. He went above and well beyond the usual commitment of students in Northwestern’s summer extern program.”
When his six-week externship was over, Cotter returned to Yale, but continued working with the CROR team, helping to draft a paper on the systematic review. Cotter is the first author on a paper published in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 2024. The paper reported that while there aren’t a lot of evidence-based interventions for depression for people with spinal cord injury, therapies delivered online and the antidepressant venlafaxine XR appear promising.
Cotter has as always wanted to go into medicine. “My Abuelo, my grandfather on my mom's side, was a radiation oncologist. I saw the way that he lived his life and how he was dedicated to his career. He's from Guatemala and he often flew patients in from Guatemala to Ocala, Florida, letting him stay in his house so that he could treat their cancers,” says Cotter. “And my uncle is an ER doctor who showed me that medicine is a field in which curiosity and sociability can flourish, and I really admire him as well.”
Cotter earned a degree in biology from Florida State University. During his undergraduate years, he participated in research, served as an Emergency Medical Responder and even started his own tutoring business. After graduation, he spent a year working as a rehabilitation therapy technician with patients at Memorial Hospital of Jacksonville. From there, he started medical school at Yale. He will graduate in the spring of 2025 and go on to do his residency in anesthesiology at the University of Florida - Jacksonville.
“I loved living in Jacksonville so much that getting the opportunity to go back there for residency quickly became my top choice and number one priority,” says Cotter. “So I’m very grateful to have matched there.”