Student Spotlight: Milan Dolezal, M2
Milan Dolezal is a current M2 student, 2025 MSSRP/LEADS researcher, and CARE student under the mentorship of Dr. Karsten Lunze. Her research, “Peer perspectives on the use of embodied conversational agents to improve buprenorphine retention: a community-engaged qualitative study,” explores whether an embodied conversational agent can help improve buprenorphine treatment retention for people with opioid use disorder (OUD). Through focus groups with people in recovery, they identified the kinds of support that would be most useful and used those insights to shape the intervention’s design. Milan and her mentor are now using the agent in a clinical trial where we examine whether this patient-informed digital tool can help people stay engaged in treatment.
Milan was drawn to substance use research because of the prevalence of substance use disorder in our BMC community. She has had the opportunity to learn from the clinicians and researchers at BMC who are providing exceptional care and leading important research in this area. Her project has allowed her to work alongside and learn from people with OUD in crafting interventions grounded in lived experiences. Despite the efficacy of buprenorphine treatment in reducing all-cause mortality for people with OUD, discontinuation rates are high. This research is important because it aims to improve retention rates with a digital tool that has been successful in improving retention in other patient populations but has never been tested within the OUD community.
Through her research experience, Milan has learned that she is motivated when working with people with OUD and can see herself treating OUD as a physician in the future. She is in the process of submitting a manuscript now and presented a research poster at the Medical Student Research Symposium in February.