Were you interested in science as a child?

From the earliest age, I was interested in developmental biology. From watching the metamorphosis of tadpoles I caught in the local pond to breeding mice in my basement, much to the chagrin of my mother, I was hooked. My room was called the zoo: at any one time, I had more than a dozen animals.

Were you interested in science as a child? Did you like school? Did anyone (parents, teachers, friends) influence your decision to go into science?

I was born during my father's graduate studies at the University of Oregon, and after my mother had started her career as an RN. While my mom worked nights and weekends, in part to save on childcare costs, I accompanied my dad to the lab.

I did enjoy school when it started; kindergarten was great. Then my family moved across the country before first grade, taking a red-eye flight that arrived the morning of my first day at the new school. I still remember having White Castle for dinner/breakfast when we arrived at 2 a.m. I didn't enjoy my first days there and for several months I needed to be bribed to walk across the lawn to the school (we lived next door). Eventually I started going without such enticements, but candy remains a strong persuasive force with me.

High school was actually a very fun time for me, since I attended a public school that adhered to an unconventional curriculum. There were no 9th or 10th grade English courses, except Shakespeare, women's literature, and philosophical writings. Thanksgiving was replaced with a Multicultural Feast. The school was small, so I took most of my classes down the street at the nearby university. It was a great time to enjoy both the social science and humanities curriculum, and I had an active interest in international politics and Francophone literature. Science, even physics with a bunch of scary engineering students before I had finished calculus, was still the most compelling to me.

Undoubtedly, what kept me in science were my professors in college. I studied chemistry and biochemistry at University of Michigan, which has a fairly small number of chemistry majors. There were ample opportunities for students to work closely with professors as teaching assistants and lab members. One professor, Brian Coppola, approached organic chemistry through sessions modeled after art studio classes. Eva Feldman, an MD/PhD who earned her degrees before many combined programs were available, taught me a lot about the physician-scientist career path while I worked in her lab.

What prompted you to go into an MD/PhD program?
As a child we often had social events with the lab, and I knew all of my father's graduate students very well. There was a particularly charismatic student, Steve Olsen, who introduced me to foul-language Christmas carols and gave me my first cassette tape (Fine Young Cannibals, still know all the songs by heart).

He had moved with us across the country and was very close to my family. He was the first in a line of MD/PhD students that I met before college, who really made me want to be like them, to be fluent in both medical and basic science. Despite being almost as far in my training, I still don't feel that I have captured that mystique I perceived in those students.

What brought you to Gladstone? Why did you choose to study the heart?
When I came to UCSF, I was pretty sure that I wanted to stay in the basic sciences, likely chemical biology. I started my PhD in such a lab at UC Berkeley's chemistry department. However, medical school had influenced me more than I first realized, so I sought out a collaborative project with a more translational science approach. I met Josh Ransom at the Tetrad retreat in 2005 and e-mailed Deepak. What started out as a collaboration turned into a full-time endeavor. I was quite excited to start working on miRNAs since my undergraduate work, in Nils Walter's lab, focused on RNA biophysics.

Studying cardiovascular development is particularly interesting not only because of my interest in RNA, but also because of the nature of the organ system. As Deepak often says, understanding the heart clinically is fairly straightforward. Patients' symptoms can be understood so long as all of the underlying causes have been identified; any clinical finding can be explained, and unexplained symptoms or lab values indicate that there is another condition you haven't found yet. Though I am not sure what area I am interested in clinically (one life decision at a time, please), I really enjoy being able to understand cardiac illness biophysically.

I am very fortunate to have ended up in Deepak's lab. It is not common for MD/PhD students to have mentors who are active both in basic science and clinical care. He has been a wonderful role model for how to strike that balance and has always impressed me when I see him go between those two worlds. I hope to do the same some day.

How do you see yourself in 25 years?
Still training? Hopefully by then I will be at a university where I have a lab with many eager scientists and clinical duties with engaging colleagues. My husband and I have fallen in love with the California lifestyle, so it would be great if we had finally learned to surf by 2033.

What do you see as the appropriate role of physician-scientists?
Well, I think that the question of the appropriate role of physician-scientists is actually better handled on an individual basis since there are so many career paths. There are all sorts of training paths that produce physician-scientists and others interested in translational science. In my opinion, those trained by publicly funded programs, such as UCSF's Medical Scientist Training Program, have a duty to contribute to public knowledge and wellbeing. We can all strive to do our best as scientists, healthcare providers, and teachers, regardless of our degrees and career roles.

On the admissions committee for the medical school here, I have encountered many applicants that want to go to medical school to better inform their future research. I think that it would be exciting to have a fellowship option for PhD researchers to obtain clinical experience relevant to their research and similarly to MD fellowships with dedicated research time. We can always benefit as individuals from more training, but that must be balanced with the time demands of more education. So while the appropriate role of physician-scientists is up to the individual, I hope our educational system will adapt to provide the desired training in more modular ways.