Samantha Tse, MD/PhD student
“I really fell in love with the community, not only the student community, but the faculty community. When I first interviewed here, I was completely gobsmacked by how close the students were.”
It was a sense of community and togetherness that brought Samantha Tse to UMass Chan Medical School to earn her MD/PhD.
"I really fell in love with the community, not only the student community, but the faculty community. When I first interviewed here, I was completely gobsmacked by how close the students were," Tse said.
Tse has held various positions on the Medical Scientist Training Program Student Council. This year she is one of the co-leaders for the peer mentorship program; she previously served as senior chairperson and trustee. After graduating from Boston College with a bachelor's degree in biology, Tse worked as a research technician at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. It was her work here that led to her passion for research and medicine.
"They showed me how awesome it is to work in medicine and also pursue a career in science because not only can you get to know patients at a very deep and personal level, but you can take that and then bring that into the lab and figure out mechanisms, drugs and therapeutics to combat symptoms and diseases," Tse said.
Working in the lab of Read Pukkila-Worley, MD, associate professor of medicine, Tse is researching host-pathogen relationships in the nematode Caenorhabditis Elegans (C. elegans). By studying the biology of C. elegans, scientists can obtain a deeper understanding of the function of specific genes in a whole organism. This can potentially reveal the function of genes that relate to many human diseases, such as intestinal diseases and neurological disorders. Tse and fellow MD/PhD student Nick Peterson received Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards from the National Institutes of Health to analyze the ways a host organism recognizes bacteria that can cause disease. As one of the inaugural winners of the Robert W. Finberg, MD, Memorial Research Training Award, Tse presented her research during the Program in Innate Immunity’s Innate Immunity Day.
Tse hopes to combine her passions and become a pediatric gastroenterologist who researches to the causes of intestinal diseases. As a physician-scientist, she would like to develop therapeutics to alleviate symptoms for her young patients.