Name: Nisha Kalmadi
Hometown: Washington, DC
Undergrad: Arizona State University
What brought you to Georgetown?: I lived in the DC area while working at the NIH and fell in love with the city. It’s been an incredible opportunity to go to the city to learn about various patient populations and the vibrant community. In Georgetown, I found an excellent structure of curriculum and a student culture that has been both collaborative and supportive. It’s been an incredible environment to foster my clinical interests, providing me with exceptional mentors and opportunities to explore a wealth of new interests.
What are your post-med school career or specialty goals?: I am still thinking about my specialty, but I have a strong interest in internal medicine! I hope that as a physician, I can work with a medical school as an instructor and balance seeing patients with teaching.
What are you working on as a BellRinger Fellow this summer?: I am working with Dr. Yun-Ling Zheng to understand if measuring the length of a person’s telomeres (the protective “caps” on the ends of DNA) can be used as a reliable test to spot different types of leukemia. By comparing telomere lengths in healthy people against people with different kinds of leukemia, we hope to better understand if leukemia causes a distinct, predictable change in telomere length and if that change is distinct enough to act as a clear marker for diagnosing blood cancers.
Why are you passionate about cancer research?: With the rapid development of techniques in computer science and biological data collection, we are potentially at the forefront of an incredibly advanced approach of diagnosis and treatment for patients. By analyzing data specific to certain traits or individual patients, we can find patterns and applications that lead to better prognosis predictions and therapies, and I believe the greatest application for this advancement is in cancer research. Furthermore, as a physician, oncology has always been an interest of mine, and research would allow me to help patients on an individual and global scale.
How do you plan to be involved in BellRinger this year?: I’m not quite sure yet!
