MICCAI 2022 Daily – Wednesday

24 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Women in Science Manila Friends a little project when I stayed abroad during medical school. Abroad where? At MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. I did part of my final year rotations there, and I had a research project that was very genomics-heavy there. I explained my interest in research very broadly, and I kind of pointed out in what direction I wanted to go. But at this point, I didn't have a very specific plan to move in the direction of surgical data science. Then after a couple of months of working at that department in surgery as a clinically active physician, the senior surgeons there came up to me and offered me a position in that research project. They basically had a grant approved. They looked for physicians who had an understanding of the surgeries interested in doing this as a research topic long term. I hadn't heard of that before, but it sounded extremely interesting to me. I just talked to Stephanie Spidel, who is now one of my mentors, and I really like the team. It sounded like a very innovative project. I really was interested in advancing surgery, and I saw a lot of potential. That's why I got involved. It's exactly the contrary of most of the people that I interview in this community. Generally, they say I almost wanted to be a physician, and finally, I was a researcher. Now I'm doing both. [ laughs ] Who did you work with in Heidelberg? It was in pediatric tumor research. It's a completely different story in wet lab research. It was a doctoral thesis project, and I received a doctorate from the German Cancer Research Center. My supervisor was Professor Olaf Witt. I had a great time there, and I worked with him and his team for about four or five years. It was all during medical school. Then I took a year off during medical school to do this full time. I just really enjoyed working there. So you took one year off medical school, which is already pretty long, to make this full time? Yeah, to do this research project, because I really enjoyed lab work. I really enjoyed exploring this in more detail. You didn't mind being a student one year longer? Universitätsklinikum Dresden