From Question to Study: Designing a Feasible Medical Student Project

1 · Begin with a question · IJMS Research-to-Publication Lab

From Question to Study: Designing a Feasible Medical Student Project

28 November 2026 · Saturday · 14:00–15:30 UTC · Free online session

Intention. Help students turn a curiosity about patients, communities, or education into a focused, ethical, answerable project that fits their time and resources.

What you will take away

  • Refine a broad idea into a research question and realistic objective.
  • Choose between primary data, an existing dataset, and evidence synthesis.
  • Sketch a study design, ethics pathway, collaborators, and contingency plan.

Why this matters for medical students

Medical students often have a promising idea before they have protected time, funding, or methodological support. This session starts with the decisions that make a project doable, including settings with limited resources.

Applied activity: Draft a one-sentence question and a mini-feasibility checklist.

People behind the session

Meet the contributors. Atika Zainab and Samah Seif Eldawla Ibrahim bring complementary experience in research design, evidence synthesis, and working within real-world constraints.

Atika Zainab

Medical student, Gandhi Medical College, Hyderabad, India · IJMS Student Editor

Atika has worked across Global Burden of Disease analyses, FAERS pharmacovigilance, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and has presented research at medical conferences. Having navigated different starting points herself, she wants to help students choose between primary data, existing databases, and evidence synthesis according to their question, data access, time, and resources.

Why her perspective helps: the choice of design becomes a manageable decision rather than a barrier to beginning.

Samah Seif Eldawla Ibrahim

Pharmacy student, University of Khartoum, Sudan · IJMS Student Editor

Samah led a 2025 quasi-experimental study of peer-assisted learning in pharmacy education during conflict-related disruption. Her other work includes a project on Sudanese research output and dengue-related computational and community research. She brings lived research experience in a resource-constrained setting to the task of refining questions and matching objectives to realistic methods.

Why her perspective helps: rigor and feasibility can coexist even when circumstances are difficult.

How to join

We plan to meet on Zoom and share the session through the IJMS YouTube channel. The access link, detailed agenda, and any registration instructions will be posted once confirmed. No fee or CME credit is advertised.

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