I started figure skating at the age of three that’s when my parents put me into group lessons a little do they know that they were gonna be spending the rest of their lives in an ice rink with me after
that I was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma at the age of 15 my biggest concern was maintaining my body my strength really diminished a lot.
 
I had trouble even just getting out of bed. I still remember the night I was diagnosed the first thing I asked my dad can I still skate what what was my life gonna be like after that and you know was I gonna have full strength again was I gonna be able to skate again at the end. I finally started to feel more like myself until finally I was declared cancer-free.
 
I’ve now been free of cancer for the past nine years I was a patient that asked the doctor everything. I wanted to know every detail I wanted to know why I was getting this medicine the names of all the medicines kind of led me to this where I am a science person
and I care more about what’s happening and why is it happening currently I’m a third year almost fourth year cancer biology PhD student in addition to completing my master’s and bioinformatics right now my projects focus mainly on understanding the biology of Ewing sarcoma metastasis.
 
I do think that’s skating it and being a part of a team does very much mirror my experience in biology in the sense that yes I’m looking at individual cells and trying to improve treatment for each individual person but I’m using a teamwork approach to try and find that so again integrating biology with computational biology computer science math all of those things together what’s going to bring us forward within the next 10 years ideally would like to start my own lab the idea is to be able to take all of this math and computer science together and find new therapies and new treatment opportunities for specifically pediatric cancer my two favorite things are science and ski and I really wouldn’t imagine that any other way