Hazel Dilmore | January 29, 2018
As evidenced by its tiny size, Caltech does not have a medical school on site. Although Caltech has established joint M.D./Ph.D. programs with USC and UCLA, students in these programs spend most of their time at Caltech conducting research. Furthermore, because these medical schools are far from Caltech, few students find their way there to conduct research. This may sound troubling for someone who, like me, hopes to conduct translational research in the future. When I was deciding to commit to Caltech, I thought to myself: how am I going to get experience with medical research with such limited access to medical schools? I knew of the world renowned basic scientific research at Tech, but was that really enough?
Luckily, I found that many professors at Caltech work in partnership with medical schools and hospitals throughout the Los Angeles area. The lab that I work in, for example, has partnered with doctors at USC to obtain cystic fibrosis patient sputum samples. Most members of the lab are microbiologists, so we ask questions about the environment inside cystic fibrosis patient lungs and how microbes colonizing this environment are able to survive and develop into infection. Although most of the work that I’ve performed is done through in vitro models, it’s easy to see how my work could be translated into a more clinical setting. Outside of my lab, I know of professors that have teamed up with doctors and researchers at City of Hope, Huntington Hospital, and UCLA to name a few.
Furthermore, last term, Caltech officially dedicated the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Engineering. In celebration, Professor Yu-Chong Tai, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair and Executive Officer for Medical Engineering, was the keynote speaker at the Caltech Y’s Fall Term Friends Dinner. In his talk, he detailed the relationships that existing faculty had developed with nearby medical center to develop various medical devices. In essence, many doctors and researchers reached out to Caltech engineers to build devices suitable for their work, bringing a significant amount of new research on biomedical devices to campus. Although I am not interested in biomedical engineering, this new department will be invaluable for any current or prospective students who are.
Although I’ve discussed Caltech’s opportunities in clinical and translational research, I also want to add that there is merit in conducting basic research! Even though it may not be relevant to future goals, the skills learned in pure biology, chemistry, or biochemistry labs will be transferable to any future work, even if the transferable skill is only the process of doing research. And for this, there are few places in the world better to research than Caltech. For undergraduates, the summer undergraduate research fellowship (SURF) program is a gem. Modeled after a grant proposal process, students partner with a mentor and outline work to complete over the summer. This, along with recommendation letters and a brief application will grant a $6000 stipend to stay at Caltech (or go somewhere else!) to conduct research for 10 weeks over the summer. The away-SURF is also a great option for those students who want to work directly at a medical school.
Even though Caltech doesn’t have an established medical school, don’t underestimate its opportunities for clinical and translational research! Particularly, don’t let this be a barrier to choosing Caltech as a pre-med or pre-M.D./Ph.D. student; the opportunities I’ve listed are only the beginning, and it is entirely possible to start a new program to branch the divide between Caltech and medical research. As Yu-Chong Tai said in his talk, Caltech will never be a medical school, but it is still at the forefront in medical research, and will only continue to go forward.
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