Clara Goebel is a second-year medical student at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.
In the following blog post, she reflects on her journey to pursuing a career in urology and her experience as a Climb 4 Kidney Cancer (C4KC) Scholar.
“My experience as a Climb 4 Kidney Cancer Scholar was invaluable in teaching me how to efficiently conduct clinically relevant research with a wonderful interdisciplinary team.”
Saying Yes to STEM
I grew up in Plano, Texas, near Dallas. I always found physics, chemistry, and math tedious and difficult, so I ruled out a career in STEM very early on. To be honest, the only science class I ever liked was biology, though I really loved it. I also loved choir, learning languages, and reading, so it seemed a natural fit to pursue a career in the humanities. My mom, a native Chilean, taught ESL to immigrant families, and I planned to follow in her footsteps until a high school scheduling error resulted in my enrollment in Medical Science. When we learned about rheumatology, I thought of my Chilean grandmother who had a rare autoimmune condition. It occurred to me for the first time that I might be able to actually learn about her condition and share something that could help her. It was because of that class that I was able to envision a future where I could help bridge the language and cultural gap for people like my grandmother. From there, I went on to earn my bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where I studied French and Portuguese alongside the pre-medical prerequisites.
From Scribe to Medical Student to C4KC Scholar
After college, I started working as a scribe for a urologist who was kind enough to take me under his wing. Though I wasn’t initially interested in urology, my perspective changed as I accompanied him to our hospital’s urology tumor board, shadowed him in the operating room, and found myself asking countless questions about our patients’ cases. Before long, I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else! So, as my first year of medical school was ending, I sought out opportunities to do research in urology over the summer, and I found the opportunity to do so at the Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute.
As a C4KC Scholar, I had the privilege of working with a great team under the tutelage of the director of urologic oncology, Christopher Weight, MD, and Nicholas Heller, Ph.D. C4KC is a nonprofit organization whose goals are to raise money for research on kidney cancer, which continues to be one of the less frequently researched cancers. The other C4KC scholars included medical students from the U.S. and Spain, students studying statistics, computer science, and applied mathematics. The team was awesome, and we learned so much from each other. We all came from different educational backgrounds, so we used our weekly journal clubs to teach each other about the things we each knew most about. Topics included upper tract genitourinary malignancy, quantum computing, programming, and statistical methods in medical research. As C4KC scholars, we attended the weekly genitourinary tumor board, where we heard perspectives from general urologists, urologic oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and radiation oncologists and learned about promising cancer treatment trials and their parameters. I also had the opportunity to shadow Dr. Weight in the operating room, where I observed some of the most intricate urologic surgeries done in the world.
Publication Success, Morocco, and More
Though the summer was over in the blink of an eye, the research projects we undertook as a team showed promise for possible clinical relevance that could help physicians better treat kidney cancer patients. In June, we published our study, “AI Age Discrepancy: A Novel Parameter for Frailty Assessment in Kidney Tumor Patients”, which used machine learning to determine the difference between kidney cancer patients’ chronological ages and their AI-predicted ages from abdominal CT imaging. We found that this marker could inform clinical decision-making for patients with kidney cancer, and it was really encouraging to see the potential benefit of the work we did. We’ve since presented our findings at MICCAI 2024’s Cancer Prevention, Detection, and Intervention Workshop in Marrakesh, Morocco and the 30th European Symposium on Urogenital Radiology in Lisbon, Portugal.
Since the summer, the majority of my efforts as a C4KC scholar have been focused on the intersection between kidney cancer and language. As this study is ongoing, I can’t share many details about this project yet, but our goal is to further improve diagnostic techniques in both radiology and pathology as they relate to kidney cancer. Simultaneously, I’ve been doing prostate cancer research under the guidance of Mark Plante, M.D., chief of urology at UVMMC. In September, I presented our poster titled “The emerging role of PSMA PET as an adjunct to established diagnostic measures in prostate cancer: Insights from a large single-center retrospective study.”
Whether the research avenues I explore are within the realm of urologic oncology or gender-affirming care remains to be determined, but my experiences this summer and fall have only further confirmed my desire to become a urologist. My experience as a C4KC Scholar was invaluable in teaching me how to efficiently conduct clinically relevant research with a wonderful interdisciplinary team, and I am so grateful that I’ll be able to take those building blocks with me for the years to come.
