Future So Bright: Redding Teen EMT Heads for Science Career

REDDING, CT — That smiling-but-concerned face looking over and upside down at you while your gurney slides into the back of an ambulance may be one of your teenaged daughter’s teenaged friends.

Annika Morgan, 18, now a senior at Joel Barlow High School in Redding, has been an emergency medical responder since she was a freshman in high school, later advancing to emergency medical technician. She has racked up several thousand hours since then, as well as presidential awards for her service from both Obama and Trump. She currently volunteers with the Westport Volunteer Emergency Medical Service. She's also a lifeguard.

This would normally be the point in the narrative where we learn that Morgan’s mother is a doctor, or her father is an epidemiologist, or maybe that she comes from a long line of medics and healthcare professionals. Not this time.

"My family makes jokes about this all the time," Morgan laughed. "They don't have a single doctor in the family, or nurse, or anybody in health care."

She credits a medical textbook she bought at a flea market for three dollars while on vacation in South Carolina for planting the bug.

"I remember as a 12-year-old flipping through that and it really was captivating to me. I was learning about so many different medical procedures and medical conditions and I fell in love with medicine and I started collecting medical textbooks and reading them and I have a whole bookshelf that's full of just medical bibliographies."

Annika Morgan (left) and Ashley Ramirez

Riding in the back of all those ambulances not only taught her a lot about who she is, but also what she wanted to be.

"I thought about it and I realized that as much as I really care about my individual patients, what really draws my attention about different calls and medical situations that I respond to, was the
actual condition that I was treating. It was much more interesting to learn about 'why does this patient present this way?'"

Morgan did some soul-searching, and decided she could ultimately save more lives with science than with a scalpel. Cure a patient, save a life; cure a disease, save thousands, maybe millions.

As she began to do some research at Joel Barlow into where the choke points were for saving millions of lives through science, she discovered the problem of vaccine thermal stability. Although vaccination programs against infectious diseases and toxins are estimated to save approximately three million lives annually, another three million — mostly children — die from diseases otherwise preventable by vaccines because the miracle drugs don’t play well with heat. Morgan's work is contributing to a solution for that, and her research has been entered into an international competition.

The efforts of the Redding teen have garnered her fame beyond just Joel Barlow High. Morgan was the winner in the "Youth Innovation and Leadership" category for the 2019 edition of the prestigious Connecticut Women of Innovation Awards, handed out last month. Along with that recognition comes the $3,000 Medtronic Youth and Innovation Scholarship. Next month, she will be representing Connecticut in the 2019 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix.

Not every disease or trauma can be treated with a quickly administered hypodermic, but Annika Morgan is working on covering those, as well. She co-founded the Youth Mental Health First Aid support team at Joel Barlow. Each member of the team trains with a professional healthcare organization and learns how to respond to teenagers that are in crises.

"...Or what people typically call a 'freak-out,'" Morgan explained. "And we've learned how to respond to that, how to calm them down safely, how to talk to them and treat them with the utmost of respect and then direct them to the appropriate help or intervene, if we sense that they are threats to themselves or others.

"We also learn how to identify symptoms of depression, anxiety, different mental illnesses, and talk to the person themselves and also get proper professional help."

In addition to serving as campus freak-out first responders, Morgan and the members of her team work as confidential advisors.

"So if a student in the school is having a problem and they want to talk to someone and they're not comfortable talking to an adult, or they don't know who to go to, they can go to some of the students that are trained in mental health first aid, and we will confidentially talk to them about it."

Did we mention — did we even have to mention — that Morgan is also the captain of the Barlow Science Bowl team and a member of the varsity math team?

Although obviously driven by hyper-curiosity as all good scientists are, Morgan is also being tugged by a need to help people. Most teens would have checked off that box by just being an EMT, but the Redding teen took it one step further by helping budding EMTs with their coursework.

"I've worked with students from different surrounding EMS courses, and I'll help them review, because the state practical exams are very difficult exams. It's very 'on-your-feet' and students need a lot of practice to be comfortable, it's a very nerve-wracking experience and I go through it with them. I will correct things. I will score them. I will do mock practicals, and then I'll kind of adjust their verbiage to make sure they have the highest chances of passing."

Annika Morgan will be attending Dartmouth College in the fall.