What have you been doing (for work, for graduate/professional school, or otherwise) since you graduated from LSM? Are you working on anything outside of your current occupation?
Immediately after graduating from LSM, I pursued graduate school in the field of immunology focused on autoimmune disease. Currently, I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s hospital studying the mechanisms of tissue fibrosis – a poorly understood and devastating disease process for which there are no effective therapies. By leveraging next-generation tissue profiling technologies and patient-derived disease models, our goal is to identify novel therapeutic targets for diseases such as scleroderma and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
What is the most rewarding part of what you are doing currently?
In most cases, our cellular processes and bodies function very elegantly. Disruption of those processes, unfortunately, drives disease. The fun of working in life sciences research is being able to dynamically test and experiment with different ideas to eventually put the “puzzle pieces” of disease together. It’s also very rewarding to know that the biological insights from my work and the work of many others can give hope to the thousands who have no good treatment options.
Do you think LSM prepared you for life after college? What aspects were most helpful?
First and foremost, the LSM community is incredible. Many of them, across years, are still very close friends of mine. Professionally, members of the LSM community enter so many different avenues of life sciences – from investing to medicine; the advice I’ve received from my LSM peers in various paths has profoundly helped me strategize my research approach. Additionally, the comprehensive education that includes a thorough business and scientific grounding has enabled me to envision, and hopefully execute, the bench-to-bedside approach in a way that I wouldn’t have been as inspired to pursue had I only been exposed to one of those fields.
Do you have future plans beyond your current role?
My goal is to spin out a fibrosis therapeutics company from my current lab, based on the insights we’ve gained thus far and will accrue in the coming years. It has and will be a very long process, but it’s been a very fun and rewarding journey throughout!