Purpose

During one of my undergraduate neuroscience classes, a visiting neurosurgeon played a video of a patient with a tremor undergoing surgery to implant deep brain stimulation electrodes. The patient was awake and holding a guitar, but unable to play it. With every attempt to pluck a string, the neurosurgeons mapped his motor circuits. Using this functional readout, they identified the target, stimulated it, and enabled him to play the guitar seamlessly! This moment stayed with me because it highlighted the importance of restoring abilities patients might have lost. In the clinic, I learned more about the programming required for optimal symptom control with these devices. What started as excitement at how impactful this therapy is, soon became a commitment to improving its effectiveness through scientific inquiry and clinical implementation.

These experiences inspired my doctoral research, where I studied the cellular mechanisms of motor impairment and developed deep brain stimulation waveforms capable of producing long-lasting effects in a preclinical model of Parkinson’s disease. Throughout my PhD, I never lost sight of the patients whose symptoms remained refractory to existing therapies. Eventually, I was able to collaborate with the same neurosurgeon from my undergraduate class who showed that our novel stimulation paradigm was as effective as continuous stimulation in these patients. Translating innovation into meaningful patient outcomes has formed the foundation of my aspiration to be a physician-scientist.

My commitment to pairing rigorous science with patient care took shape early, beginning with undergraduate research, where I developed a machine learning-based seizure detection algorithm for intracranial EEG. Understanding the reality of clinical variability, allowed me to develop an algorithm that optimized for generalizability across subjects. Since then, I have pursued neurological questions across multiple scales, from EEG network analysis and diffusion tractography research at the NIH to investigating thalamic subcircuits underlying tremor and bradykinesia during my PhD. More than a decade of neuroscience research has strengthened my technical and analytical skills, and more importantly, taught me to embrace uncertainty, think systematically, and value the process of solving complex problems.

Although my research was motivated by optimizing therapies for Parkinson’s disease, my neurology rotations reinforced my passion for caring for patients across the full spectrum of neurological disorders. During my neurology sub-internship, I encountered three patients with similar cranial nerve deficits, and their final diagnoses were neurosarcoidosis, Lyme neuroborreliosis, and Miller-Fisher syndrome. Diagnosing these patients required developing and refining broad differential diagnoses through careful neurological examination and targeted testing. The process felt remarkably familiar. Forming hypotheses, gathering evidence, and applying that knowledge to guide optimal treatment is the same approach I have spent the last decade developing as a researcher. That overlap isn’t incidental—it is the direct reason that neurology represents the natural continuation of my training as a physician-scientist.

I look forward to building the clinical expertise necessary to care for patients with neurological diseases while continuing to pursue questions in therapeutic optimization and mechanistic discovery. I hope to train in a program that values both scientific innovation and compassionate patient care, allowing me to advance the field while providing exceptional care to patients facing complex neurological conditions.