Caring for the Caretakers: Smith Scholar Lilly Sirover to Focus on Well-Being of Healthcare Professionals
When Lilly Sirover joined Girls on the Run in fifth grade, she wasn’t the most coordinated runner in the group. There’s a good chance she was the most enthusiastic.
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.
Lilly is one of the most organized students I have taught; she accomplishes so much and is always ready to do more. Lilly is also incredibly positive — a person who always finds the positive in tough situations, lifts up others and shares her gratitude.
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.”
Importance of Community
Lilly Sirover was five and her sister, Sam, was a baby when their mom, Emily Scattergood, a pediatric radiologist, was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Family members, friends and neighbors in Haddonfield, New Jersey, brought dinner and helped her dad, Bill Sirover, take care of the sisters during her mother’s treatment and recovery.
Lilly has felt those strong community connections throughout her life, both at home and at Davidson. She transferred to Davidson as a sophomore, rapidly forming close bonds with her teammates and coaches, classmates and professors. She served as a senior admission fellow and sang in the Delilahs’ acapella group, among other campus activities.
But a biology course she took during her junior year changed her life. “Neuroscience of Exercise,” taught by Lom, helped her think about how pandemic isolation had affected her and other athletes by enhancing anxiety. Inspired by the course, Sirover systematically reviewed more than 20,000 research studies for a senior honors thesis comparing mental health outcomes for team versus individual sports. She concluded that positive social connections through teams may alleviate athlete anxiety and promote wellness.
She explored similar topics as a summer intern at a level-one trauma center in Camden, New Jersey, by helping to conduct research for a program that trains physicians to serve as peer supporters for their colleagues. That program has since expanded into the medical school curriculum as an elective.
Sirover during her internship in Camden, New Jersey.
“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.”
From Classroom to Hospital
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.
Through Lilly’s leadership, mentoring and support, the tutors empowered the students and helped them enjoy the experiment while learning about the underlying physics concepts. Lilly is a strong and successful leader who really cares about the students and tutors. Her leadership, sense of accountability, hard work and dedication made it a successful program.
Next Steps
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.”
Davidson in Zambia Summer 2023
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.”
The Smith Scholarship competition is administered through the Office of Fellowships. For more information about the Office of Fellowships or applying for the Smith Scholarship, visit davidson.edu/fellowships.