Crossing The Finish Line: Parallels Between MD/PhD And Running A Marathon

Crossing The Finish Line: Parallels Between MD/PhD And Running A Marathon

The road to obtaining an MD/PhD is not a sprint but a marathon.  As Charles (Chad) Coomer well knows. It’s long, grueling, requires incredible endurance, but worth every millisecond.  

Chad is completing his MD/PhD degrees at the University of Kentucky (MD) and the University of Oxford (DPhil) under the mentorship of Drs. Alex Compton (NIH/NCI) and Sergi Padilla-Parra (University of Oxford). As an undergraduate student at Western Kentucky University (WKU), Chad worked with Dr. Rodney King to identify and characterize novel bacteriophages to target Mycobacterium species. Through this work, Chad was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship, solidifying his commitment to basic research and to apply the tools learned in his undergraduate laboratory to those at the HIV Dynamics and Replication Program at the NIH/NCI as a summer intern. This work ultimately led to Chad to apply to a Fulbright Scholarship at University College London (UCL) in 2014, where Chad fostered his love of virology and translational medicine by investigating mechanisms of protease inhibitor resistance under Ravi Gupta. Ultimately, his experiences at UCL and in the UK during his Fulbright year motivated him to apply for the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars program.

His work has highlighted the role of several biophysical properties of cell membranes in the context of virus entry, particularly that of HIV-1. To accomplish this, he has developed several advanced microscopy tools in the Padilla-Parra lab, particularly by multiplexing single-virus tracking and fluorescent lifetime imaging microscopy. These tools identified key metabolic influences of host cell membrane properties that facilitate HIV-1 fusion in target cells, which is now published in PLoS Pathogens (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1008359). By utilizing these tools he developed at Oxford, Chad’s research is currently devoted to understanding how a protein called IFITM3 functions to prevent virus entry. The results of these studies are currently under review, but can be read on bioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.14.096891v1).

Chad will be defending his thesis in April 2021. Following successful completion of his PhD, Chad will return to the medical school to finish his clinical training at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Upon his completion of his MD/PhD degrees, Chad hopes to complete his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics whist continuing to investigate the mechanism of cell-intrinsic antiviral proteins in preventing virus infection. His goal is to become an investigator and lecturer at an academic clinical center to train the next generation of clinical scientists.

In his free time, Chad runs competitively for the University of Oxford and the Montgomery County Road Runners. Currently, he is also serving on the NIH COVID19 task force by assisting the testing site at the NIH. Chad often compares completing MD/PhD training to that of running a marathon. “You have to respect the distance,” Chad says, “as each person who’s running this race will train differently to you and complete it (their training) at a different pace. Training for marathon, or as an MD/PhD does not have a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but there are definitely correlates of success: consistency, recovery, and having amazing teammates. The NIH OxCam program is a perfect regimen that definitely incorporates these three factors at the core of their training.”

A Rose Among Thorns: One Scholar Shares Her Drive To Pursue Global Health Problems And Disease Control

A Rose Among Thorns: One Scholar Shares Her Drive To Pursue Global Health Problems And Disease Control

Jessica van Loben Sels is completing her DPhil in Pathology under the mentorship of Dr. Kim Green at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease and Pr. Ian Goodfellow at the University of Cambridge. Her work has led to the development of several serological assays to monitor duration and breadth of protectivity in patient serum antibodies against human norovirus. She deployed one assay in the field with the help of collaborator Pr. Stephen Baker at the University of Oxford Tropical Disease Center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where she screened infants for protective immunity against a variety of norovirus strains. Her project has elucidated immunological patterns which can inform multivalent vaccine design. Her work as also led to the identification of potentially broadly protective immunoglobulins which can help map important epitopes on the virus and serve as treatment for immunocompromised individuals who are suffering from chronic norovirus infections if the antibodies show therapeutic potential. 
 
She is set to submit her thesis in August 2020. Immediately following submission, she will begin working towards her Masters in Public Health at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her work throughout graduate school has been focused on understanding immunity and disease transmission within vulnerable populations in low- to middle-income countries (i.e. children in Vietnam). Having gained months of international field experience working with various peoples and governments to accomplish scientific goals, she decided she wanted to make a career out of field epidemiology. Upon the COVID-19 outbreak, she has worked with the NIH on the contact tracing team and gained valuable insight into the many facets of public health that respond to disease outbreaks. It is for this reason she decided to pick the concentration of Global Health Epidemiology and Disease Control for her MPH studies. Following the completion of the two-year program, she aspires to be trained by the CDC in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) fellowship program and attain a career in aiding state and federal governments respond to public health crises.