MICCAI 2020 Daily - Tuesday

22 Women in Science Now that you work in a hospital, do you ever feel that you should have chosen a different path? No, I like this complicated path! As a researcher, I think it is important to bring in a new perspective. The standard path has its advantages and some things are harder with the less conventional path. But it’s good that some researchers don’t follow it, because it adds different perspectives. I’m happy that I went in the direction that I went. We both share something in common: we are both of Italian descent. Tell us about your background. My dad was born in Italy and moved to Canada when he was 11. I grew up in Canada. I still have some family in Italy. Can you speak the language? “Un poco”. You went to a very nice list of top-tier universities. How did you get to study at these impressive institutions? I was really lucky in my undergraduate degree. The University of Montreal had a lot of great programs to help students, a lot of summer research programs. I had a really good undergraduate advisor also. His name is David London. That really helped a lot to get me started. Even before that, I started working in labs when I was 15, first in a virology lab. I had people helping me pretty early on. Tell us about Cambridge and Harvard? [ laughs ] What about them? Anything that we don’t know! It was a great experience. Cambridge was really fun. It was obviously really exciting. I was there for one-year in a program where they did all the classes for pre-PhD. I knew already that I was going to go to Harvard, although some peoplewere going to stay at Cambridge. It was really cool. What about Harvard? Harvard was awesome also. I obviously learned a lot. It was really nice to be around so many smart people, both the students and the professors. Going through all of these high-level institutions, did you ever feel that you couldn’t measure up to the people DAILY Tu e s d a y