I worked as an orthopedic research assistant at the St. Francis Center for Hip and Knee Surgery from summer 2006 through summer 2009. In that time, I authored a paper on hybrid total knee replacement published in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research and a paper on the treatment of infected hip and knee replacments published in Orthopedics.
After graduating from IU in May 2011, I returned to CHKS as a full-time research writer. I published a paper about the role of the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) in total knee replacement in the British open-source journal Bone and Joint Research in April of 2012. Another paper, on the importance of pre-operative knee alignment in a successful knee replacement, was published in the Jan. 16, 2013, issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, the most prestigious of orthopedic journals. Two other papers, one on whether the surgeon (not the implant type) is more important in TKR success, and another evaluating when are the best times for total knee replacement patients to come into the clinic for check-ups, were published in the HSS Journal and The Bone and Joint Journal, respectively.
Medical SchoolIn June of 2013, after spending a week in Guatemala, six weeks at the Journal & Courier, and the rest of that spring mulling over my career plans, I enrolled in my first pre-med class at my alma mater in Bloomington. I continued the non-degree pre-medical track at IUPUI while volunteering in the zebrafish lab of Dr. James Marrs, and in March 2015 I was accepted into the IU School of Medicine. My two years of lecture classes on the West Lafayette campus began in August 2015, I began clinical rotations in June 2017, and I will graduate in May 2019.
Thanks to an IU School of Medicine summer research grant, I spent the summer of 2016 in the lab of Dr. Scott Briggs, working under his Ph.D. candidate Nina Serratore. I used fusion PCR and yeast transformation protocols to knock out various epigenetic factors in Candida glabrata in order to study the fungus' susceptibility to azole drugs. I also began development of a protocol to use CRISPR/Cas9 plasmids as an alternative method of mutation generation in lab fungi.
Thanks to two other grants from the IU School of Medicine, I traveled to Argentina and Kenya during the second and fourth years. I spent two weeks of December 2016 in Cordoba, Argentina, at the Hospital Cordoba through Child Family Health International. The Hospital Medicine in Latin America program enabled me to observe how Argentina strives to implement universal health care through its three-prong health insurance system. In January and February 2019, I spent seven weeks in Eldoret, Kenya, on an elective through AMPATH, a partnership between North American universities led by IU and Moi University School of Medicine. While there, I worked alongside Kenyan medical students to see patients in the hospital, attended lectures, and, as in Argentina, observed how the Kenyan Ministry of Health is working to implement universal health care through its National Hospital Insurance Fund.
Match Day 2019 is on March 15, so I'm looking forward to learning where I will spend my first four years as a doctor.