ONCAMPUS “In practice, you get the instant gratification of making someone feel better. In research, you’re not going to change someone’s life right away, but you are going to solve important problems for the long run.”
STUDENT PROFILE: ALISA LEE (D’22)
— ALISA LEE (D’22)
When Research Opportunity Knocks Fourth-year DMD student Alisa Lee (D'22) has excelled at research on a variety of fronts throughout her time at Penn Dental Medicine. When Alisa Lee (D’22) decided to apply to dental school, she was looking for opportunities for research, the kind that would make a real difference in people’s health and a meaningful contribution to the world of dentistry. As a fourth-year DMD student at Penn Dental Medicine, she has already made great strides toward her research goals, publishing five papers, completing a research gap year, and winning a prestigious research fellowship. Born in South Korea, Lee immigrated to Canada when she was 10, and grew up in Vancouver and Seattle. In seventh grade, when a teacher assigned an in-depth exploration of a potential career, she chose dentistry because she liked the way it combined science with hands-on skills. Years later, as a chemistry major at Cornell, a stint as an editor on a student research journal and a medical service trip to Honduras solidified her interest in health care, and dentistry in particular. She applied to 10 dental schools and chose Penn Dental Medicine.
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AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE IN ORAL HEALTH RESEARCH Halfway through her first year, Lee applied to Penn Dental Medicine’s research honors program, and that summer she started working on her first dental research project. In the lab of her mentor, Dr. Anh Le, Chair of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, she began to study the ways in which a type of cells called cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) interact with cancer cells and tumor microenvironment, creating a community that communicates through messenger molecules. Focusing on tongue cancer and oral pharyngeal cancer, the team explored the ways in which these cells affect movements in the cell community, including tumor growth, metastasis, and therapeutic resistance. Her interest in research grew as she served as vice president and then president of the Vernon Brightman Research Society, the primary student research organization at Penn Dental Medicine. The group, the
School’s chapter of the American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research Student Research Group, promotes interest and awareness in student research, hosting an annual dental research expo and a “research speed-dating” event that pairs incoming first-year students with potential research opportunities.
A GAP YEAR AND A FELLOWSHIP Between her second and third years, Lee learned about another research-related opportunity, a gap year as a Medical Research Scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Although it was hard to leave campus and her classmates, she decided the experience was too good to pass up. Among others, she worked on a project that measured the activity of enzymes in patients with hyperphosphatemic familial tumor calcinosis (HFTC), a rare genetic disorder in which patients present with a unique teeth phenotype featuring abnormal calcifications. Her team’s work resulted in two journal articles published earlier this year. Returning to Dr. Anh Le’s lab after a rewarding year at NIH, she jumped right into another research project, this one on stem cells. Using dental pulp stem cells (DPSC) gathered through wisdom tooth extractions, the team explored the possibility of using these cells to regenerate bone in patients with craniofacial injuries and deformities. Creating a small bone defect in the jaws of rats, they introduced DPSC in the form of cost-effective
