"The Student Experience" showcases University of Iowa students who excel academically—inside and outside the classroom. This is our latest entry in the series; look for the next story on April 27.

Little did she know it, but McKenzie Wallace was destined to study at the University of Iowa from when she was 11 years old.

That was when a close family friend with two daughters whom Wallace had played with for years passed away from Huntington disease. The decline in her friends’ mother was gradual and visible—typical in HD sufferers—but the finality of it all struck Wallace hard.

“When she passed away, my dad told me, and I just broke down in tears,” Wallace recalled. “I couldn’t function that day. I was bawling my eyes out at the funeral. It was the first time that I had experienced death and just knowing what was going to happen to her daughters.”

The experience emboldened Wallace, a senior from Rockford, Illinois. She applied to the UI in large part due to its strength in HD research. Accepted as an early admit into the UI nursing program, Wallace approached Nancy Downing, an HD specialist hired to join the UI’s genetics cluster, about helping out in her lab.

Downing hired Wallace in June, just after she finished her freshman year. From that moment, Wallace was on the lab’s payroll and a co-leader of a project examining how diet and exercise affect the disease’s progression.

“She was a go-getter,” says Downing, an assistant professor in the UI College of Nursing. “She seemed to very quickly understand what was needed and not need much guidance. She took the initiative, which was exceptional (for a student) at her level.”

“Nancy just let me kind of take over as much as I wanted to,” related Wallace, a double major in nursing and international studies/global health. “So, I just jumped in and tried to find out what would work. It was something I had absolutely no training for whatsoever. It’s kind of like detective work. The more I did, the more I liked it, and the more I wanted to do.”

Wallace’s research included organizing the study, recruiting participants, conducting the research, analyzing data, and writing about the results. The payoff: first authorship on a paper that will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal this spring.

“Well, she earned it,” Downing says of giving her student lead authorship on the manuscript, a rarity for an undergraduate. “She was a very hard worker, and she didn’t just treat it like a job. She acted in the full capacity as a researcher, which is having intellectual conversations from the beginning.”

Wallace dove into another line of research: maternal health. Under the guidance of Audrey Saftlas in the UI College of Public Health, she is comparing how health care systems in the U.S. and Germany affect the information and care that pregnant mothers receive. During winter break, Wallace worked in a medical clinic in Hannover, Germany, to learn more about the pre-natal care that mothers receive. Her preliminary findings, to be included in her senior thesis: Germany, with state-mandated insurance, offers more thorough care for pregnant and birthing mothers, with better maternal health outcomes, than the U.S.

“If you’re a pregnant mother (in Germany), it’s assumed you go to the doctor,” she says. “It’s assumed you will do that for yourself and for your baby. In the U.S., it’s more difficult to do, and that’s a different perception.”

Saftlas had not worked with an undergraduate until Wallace approached her on the cusp of her junior year.

“I was very impressed with her degree of knowledge and focus on what she wanted to do and how organized she was with going about what she wanted to do,” says Saftlas, an epidemiology professor.

“She’s got a curious mind,” Saftlas continued, “and as someone who wants to deliver top midwifery care, she’s set out to learn what are the components of top maternity care in other industrialized countries that have, in some instances, better birth outcomes and better maternal health outcomes as well.”

Wallace has supplemented her research knowledge with direct contacts with patients. This semester, she landed an internship in the labor and delivery unit at UI Hospitals and Clinics. For about 18 hours each week, Wallace visits with mothers and counsels them mainly post-delivery, from changing diapers to breastfeeding.

She’s also there to listen, and to reassure.

“A lot of (new mothers), they’re so overwhelmed,” Wallace says, “they don’t have specific questions to ask.”

The internship puts her squarely on a determined path to obtaining a master’s in nursing midwifery and a doctorate in nursing. Wallace learned earlier this month she had been accepted by Ohio State. (She would have stayed at the UI if there were a midwifery program, she says.)

“I love the entire experience,” Wallace says, unable to contain her enthusiasm. “It’s absolutely phenomenal to be part of bringing a child into the world. It’s breathing, it has a name, it’s just unbelievable.”