I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and got my undergraduate degree in Biology from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After college, I spent a year working under the mentorship of a congenital heart surgeon, Dr. Richard Hopkins, on developing a tissue-engineered heart valve that could be implanted in a child and grow with them into adulthood. In this role, I spent untold hours at the bench in the laboratory but also in the operating room and in clinical conferences seeing first-hand the value of anchoring research questions in clinical medicine and the role of the physician scientist. I then went to medical school at the Weill Cornell Medical College where my clinical rotations cemented my love for caring for children and their families. After graduation I was fortunate to come to Children’s Hospital Colorado for my pediatrics residency, pediatric cardiology fellowship, and advanced training in cardiac imaging and pediatric pulmonary hypertension. As I saw modeled both by my first mentor and my current longtime mentor, Dr. Jesse Davidson, the core inspiration for my current work came from a fundamentally clinical question. As a fellow working in the intensive care unit, I cared for numerous infants and children with single ventricle heart disease having one of their staged palliation surgeries. Time and time again their clinical risk stratification metrics would indicate good surgical candidacy but then in the post-operative period, they would struggle. It was clear that the available predictive tools were insufficient, but no better ones existed. Through many conversations, Dr. Davidson and I mapped a plan to leverage the power of metabolomic and proteomic assays and machine learning algorithms to deep phenotype this population in hopes of developing a more precise risk stratification algorithm and potentially identify novel therapeutic targets to improve post-operative and long-term outcomes. Throughout the roller coaster of translational research, I have found myself repeatedly re-anchoring on this approach and re-focusing on the desire to do better by the patients I am working to serve. As a junior physician scientist, it is, of course, necessary to follow the data and research questions where they lead but also to never forget the patients who inspired you to start on the journey.

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