Caring for the Caretakers: Smith Scholar Lilly Sirover to Focus on Well-Being of Healthcare Professionals

She loved running and talking with friends and mentors who offered lessons about making healthy choices, developing positive self-esteem and becoming a leader. She joined the cross-country team at her middle school, and as a ninth grader made her high school’s varsity team, which won a state championship. 

That early health and wellness focus — from home and team sports — guided her through her years as a distance runner at Davidson College, where she ran on the women’s cross country and track and field teams.

When COVID-19 disrupted normal routines, she continued to run alone but missed her team, realizing how important their support and camaraderie were. As the daughter of physicians and an aspiring one herself, she also saw the toll the pandemic took on medical professionals. That combined experience ignited a passion for ensuring that people facing stress — from elite athletes to physicians dealing with life and death situations — get the support they need to stay physically and mentally healthy.

She graduated magna cum laude from Davidson after majoring in biology, with a minor in public health. She’ll continue her education by spending a year in the United Kingdom as a 2024 Smith Scholar. 

Davidson’s W. Thomas Smith Scholarship honors graduating seniors for outstanding academic achievement, leadership, character and community service. It models scholarships such as the Rhodes and Fulbright and pays for a year of graduate study abroad. This year, Davidson funded two Smith scholarships. Toshaani Goel ’24, earned the other Smith scholarship and is featured in a separate article. 

Sirover will head to the University of Exeter in England this fall for a master’s degree in global public health, then hopes to move on to medical school and a career as a physician.

Lom said Sirover frequently looks out for others, whether its teammates, classmates, family and friends; at the Ada Jenkins Center leading a STEM club for kids; or a child in Zambia who needed a running buddy. 

“She is very inclusive, she really sees people, and checks in on them to make sure they are okay,” Lom said. “She is extremely smart, talented, team minded and determined. I would never want to stand between Lilly and a goal — that would be a dangerous place to be located.”

“Lilly brought her typical enthusiasm and diligence to this project and helped gather data, organize the curriculum, and prepare materials to advertise the program throughout the hospital,” said Nicole Fox, a pediatric trauma surgeon and medical director at the hospital. 

“I was pleasantly surprised at the impact this had on her and that she wants to work on the issues of burnout and mental health in physicians,” she said. “For Lilly to recognize the significance of this so early in her pursuit of a medical career reassures me that there are students entering this field who can work to reverse this concerning trend and serve as ambassadors for wellbeing and engagement in the workplace.”

Her research showed that some 80% of physicians experience burnout at some point in their careers —  burnout that was exacerbated by the pandemic. She experienced contributing reasons personally. Her dad, a nephrologist, spent many hours during the pandemic in a hospital intensive care unit, where he treated seriously ill patients who required ventilators. Before the pandemic, her family ate dinner together every night. During the pandemic, her father spent months in a separate area of their house, not eating or socializing with their family to minimize the potential for spreading the virus. 

“I rarely saw him,” Sirover said. “The stress he faced was alarming to me.”

In addition to her research at the hospital, Sirover also shadowed and assisted the trauma team in assessing patients, conducting rounds and in the operating room. Again, she impressed the professionals.

“Her enthusiasm was infectious, and she became a well-respected and valued member of the team,” Fox said. “She has a palpable passion for medicine and life in general. She does not hesitate to find out how she can help and be involved. She’s not the type of person who watches and waits to be directed. She innately knows what is needed and gets to work immediately.”

Enthusiasm is one of the words most often used to describe Sirover.

That held true at the Ada Jenkins Center in Davidson, where she worked with the college’s Center for Civic Engagement to found and lead tutors in a STEM enrichment club for elementary school students. Many of the students at Ada Jenkins speak English as a second language and come from disadvantaged backgrounds. She loved sharing with them the joy she finds in STEM topics.

She invited Physics Professor Mario Belloni, who taught her in two of his classes, to lead an experiment during one of the weekly sessions at Ada Jenkins.

Sirover took her MCAT in June. She’s also planning to submit her thesis for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. She’s enjoying spending time with family and friends in her hometown, after spending last summer studying away with the Davidson in Zambia program. 

In Zambia, exercise as an outlet was a recurring theme.

She played soccer with medical students and the lone doctor at the hospital and noticed how the pickup games helped wipe away the stress of the day for everyone. She started running with a boy who had autism when his mom worried that it wasn’t safe for him to run alone. 

“Going abroad was always something that I wanted to do as part of my college experience,” she said. “I could not be happier with the way I did it, going with a group of nine Davidson students and a professor and then meeting so many new people.”

One of their first group activities was tackling a bungee-cord-like rope swinging exercise.

“That was such a metaphor for me — literally and figuratively — jumping out of my comfort zone while we were all cheering each other on as we participated in this extreme sport together,” she said. “It was an incredibly supportive community, with each of us bringing different perspectives and knowledge and identities as we sought a broader understanding of global public health.”

She’ll continue acquiring that global health education at Exeter. She’s also excited to join the university’s Athletic Club and will continue to run and compete in races. If she becomes a physician as planned, she intends to actively encourage and support other health care providers in activities like running, yoga and team sports.

“Running keeps me grounded and being part of a team has always kept me accountable,” she said. “You’ve got to take care of your own health if you’re going to take care of others.”