“Thank you science, thank you,” said Dr. Foley, my mentor at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, when we finally saw a faint band on our immunoblot after having optimized and repeated the experiment more than ten times over the period of two months. Moments like this, are the moments at which biomedical science begins, the start of its long journey to clinical medicine. To me, being a physician-scientist means working right at the membrane between theoretical science, which has the power to generate new knowledge, and clinical medicine, which acts as a conduit for this new knowledge to reach the patients in a digestible and more practical way. This is precisely the place between the abstract and the concrete that I wish to occupy in …show more content…
Gregg Semenza’s laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As I studied the role of Hypoxia-inducible factor in integrin expression and breast cancer metastasis, I wanted to further discover the ways in which scientific innovations leave the laboratory and are translated in a clinical setting. I went on to shadow Dr. Roisin Connolly, a medical oncologist and a physician scientist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, who implement her research in adjuvant and neoadjuvant chemotherapy in treating her patients. The time I spent shadowing Dr. Connolly helped me place my research experience within the context of clinical medicine. What seemed like a singular biological phenotype reconstructed itself as a multidimensional concept– it was then I realized how powerful academic research could be as a tool for patient treatment, given its synergy with medicine. This coupling of my research and shadowing experience piqued my interest in translational research. Over the years, I have gathered my experience on the bench and in my academic studies. This has allowed me to improve my ability to seek deeper understanding of the scientific concepts, and become better at experiment planning, science writing, and the analysis of scientific literature, which are all essential skills in being a physician