Pills (Rodrigo Senna) "It's just a vast array of people who all come at this single question of how to treat disease, and we are all moving toward one goal." --Renee Commerford In 2003, Renee Commerford was approaching the end of her second postdoctoral appointment and staring out at an uncertain career in diabetes research. She had cast a broad net looking for a permanent job and had received of...
Adding fluid to a test tube. Credit: Comstock Medical (Image: Comstock Medical) "Without the research residency, it may have been 6 or 7 years before I got back to the lab." --Michael McCarthy As he approached the end of his M.D.-Ph.D. program at Rush University in Chicago, Illinois, Robert Sargis expected to spend his next training phase in a traditional 3-year clinical residency, perhaps follow...
Magnifying glass (credit: Comstock) "You have to be successful in the lab, but by the same token a major part of your research is driven by the care of patients. So you have to find a way to do all of that and still be able to sleep." --Dan Cahill Susan Voglmaier describes herself as "the last one standing" in academic medicine from a residency class that included six M.D.-Ph.D. students. Voglma...
Cash Money (Photos8.Com) "If you want to be the person who is setting the standard of care and changing the paradigm of the way we treat disease, then stay in academic medicine. Don't let debt be a distracter that determines your future career." --Christine Chung As the new millennium got under way, Robert Vonderheide was poised to become a star clinical researcher at a top research institution. ...
Depression (Sara Björk) "People with mental illness have much less insight than they would normally. I've seen this over and over again with healthcare professionals that as soon as they get depressed they explain it away as unworthiness or something else." --Alice Flaherty It's not easy being the poster child for depressed physicians, but Alice Flaherty wears the role with aplomb. She relishes t...
Woman with microscope, credit: Comstock Comstock "Sometimes I look around and ask myself, 'Who is the next generation of female immunologists?' They are there, but there are not a lot of them." --Laurie Glimcher In the 5 years since former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers made a household name for himself by suggesting that women may lack an "intrinsic aptitude" for science, there...
