My journey in biomedical work is unusual but has given me unique perspectives that still, to this day, guides me in my life. It began when I had left my home in Louisiana at the age of 14 and quickly realized that without an education, I would not be able to live the life that I wanted. As I searched in my youth for direction, I found it in biology and medicine. During high school, I lived unusual experiences, including a few years in Spain where I paradoxically attended a highly privileged American School yet experienced food insecurity. I reunited with my mother in Miami with a suitcase in hand, no prospects, but plenty of fire in me when I was 18. I lived with her in a studio apartment, and she put me through college by selling clothes at Burdines, and later Macys.
During this time I gravitated towards biology and medical research. In College I majored in Biochemistry and Microbiology, and was heavily engaged in biomedical research as an undergraduate. My aspiration was to enroll into an M.D./Ph.D. program. However, my grades were not competitive, and I was accepted into Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY but without matriculation into the doctoral program in biomedical sciences. During my time at AECOM, I applied unsuccessfully for graduate school three times, and was ultimately told by the MD/PhD Director that I wasn’t a good fit for this career. Undeterred, I was awarded a 1 year medical student fellowship by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and which was actually more competitive than admittance to the graduate school at AECOM. Three months into the HHMI award, my mentor was recruited to Northwestern University, and asked me if I would like to come with him. My mentor helped me enter the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Northwestern through the back door, and I helped build the neurology research labs from scratch. This experience was one of the most crucial experiences I ever had in biomedical research.
Following my MD/PhD at Northwestern, I was admitted to a very competitive residency program at University of California, San Francisco. At UCSF, I obtained training in Anatomic Pathology and Neuropathology, and performed a Developmental Neuropathology research fellowship funded by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. During this work, I performed, for the first time, an autopsy on a child with a documented non-polyalanine repeat mutation (NPARM) in the gene Phox2b. We were thus the first to describe the human neuropathological findings of NPARM Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome. From this proband, I designed a “humanized” mouse Phox2b mutation, and as I joined the faculty at Ohio State University built a basic research laboratory where I described several mechanistic findings in this disease. Concurrently, I built a thriving clinical practice in Neuropathology, tripling our consultation volume over the years I was at OSU.
During my experiences, the scientific challenges of the research forced me to upskill and acquire multiple new techniques, including coding in the R programming language, machine learning, computer vision, and AI techniques. This ended up being a perfect fit for my career, as Pathology in general, but neuropathology in particular, was leaning into the tech space. I lead the institution of Digital Pathology in neuropathology starting in 2016 with remote telepathology and fully transitioned digital in 2018. These skills gave me the background to become board eligible in Clinical Informatics, opening a new avenue in my career that I hope to bring to the FIU ecosystem.
In 2024, I was recruited as the first FIU-Baptist joint hire and joint physician-scientist. My goal is to continue my research in mechanisms of neuropathological injury as well as biomarker development. I am also very excited to contribute to the mission of our academic community at FIU, which now includes not only HWCOM research, but also the clinical operations of Baptist Hospital and Niklaus Children’s hospital.
