What first drew you to the field, and how did your experiences as a resident at Duke shape your career?
Like many people in the field, I discovered radiation oncology by accident while working as a clinical research coordinator before medical school. What really drew me was the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with patients during treatment and then continue caring for them long-term in follow-up. At the same time, coming from a computational background, I was really excited by the combination of medicine, technology, data and physics – it felt like there was a way to translate engineering and technology into patient care.
Residency at Duke played a major role in shaping my career path. I received great clinical training that shaped how I approach patient care, and it was also where I began developing the foundation of my research program and lab today, particularly around applying informatics and AI to improve cancer care.
Since graduating in 2019, what have been some of your accomplishments?
From an academic and research perspective, one of the most meaningful parts of my career has been mentoring trainees and junior faculty as they grow into independent researchers themselves. It’s incredibly rewarding to see people you’ve worked closely with go on to build successful careers and programs of their own.
On the research side, I’m proud of the work our team has done to help move AI into real clinical practice. This was in no small part due to SHIELD-RT, which we did during my residency at Duke, and was an especially important milestone because it demonstrated that machine learning could improve patient outcomes in a meaningful way.
How do you balance clinical work, research and leadership roles, and what keeps you motivated across these different areas?
I don’t 😊. Balance is hard, and I think most people in academic medicine are constantly recalibrating how they spend their time. I try to be intentional about where my time goes, although it rarely works out exactly as planned. The clinical, research and leadership parts of my career are all very different from one another. When one area becomes especially intense, the others provide a different pace and perspective, and they all ultimately connect back to improving patient care.
What advice would you give to current Duke Radiation Oncology residents?
It’s very easy during training to get caught up in the various “checklists” of things you feel like you need to accomplish on paper. But I think it’s more important to spend time thinking about what you actually want your career and life to look like long-term, and then work backwards from there. Academic medicine can pull people in a lot of different directions, so thinking about and prioritizing what matters most to you makes it much easier to make decisions along the way.