Two UCSF clinicians were recognized on STAT's 2019 Wonderkind list, which includes the most impressive doctors and researchers early in their careers.
Over the past several months, a team of STAT editors and reporters pored through hundreds of nominations from across North America, on the hunt for clinicians and researchers on the cusp of launching their careers but not yet fully independent.
All are blazing new trails as they attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in science and medicine.
Greg Haro
Strangely, it was Dr. Greg Haro’s background as a professional trumpet player that led him to a career in medicine.
While in college, where he earned a degree in classical trumpet performance, he played a gig with a trombone player who happened to be a cardiac surgeon who ran a lab. Haro wound up working in that lab, and a decade later, he is now a general surgery resident at the University of California, San Francisco, with a focus on thoracic oncology.
Part of Haro’s research has focused on ushering lung cancer classification into the molecular age. Clinicians typically assign patients’ disease a stage (1 through 4) based on pathological features, but, as Haro said, “there are other ways to look at the cellular characteristics besides the microscope.”
Sara LaHue
Acareer in science and medicine was always a dream for Dr. Sara LaHue. Her family bought her toy microscopes when she was young and she looked up to her chemist grandfather. But when she was a teenager and her grandmother began to show signs of cognitive impairment, pursuing that dream became more real.
“Watching her personality change and her memories disappear really set me on a path to better understand cognitive impairment and psychology,” she said about her grandmother, who was eventually diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. “Much of my passion for this is really related to my family.”
>read more