FIRST PERSON
“We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams” Curiosity, scientific passion, and a commitment to social justice fuels one student’s dream to shape the future of healthcare.
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hen biology faculty Gail Lima came to SISTERS, Winsor’s Black Affinity Group, promoting the YES for CURE Program, Emma Charity ’21 applied (at her mother’s urging). After three years of summer research projects and biomedical research, Emma talks about her experience. Why are you interested in this field? My extended family on my Black side have all, in some way, experienced prejudice in the American health care system. Knowing that I am taking steps to create a more inclusive future and make them proud of me is very rewarding. My grandparents, retired physicians themselves, faced unimaginable obstacles to even exist in the medical space. The opportunities I have available are immense compared to even two generations ago, not to mention the centuries preceding.
What’s been most surprising about your health equity work? I have been surprised by both the extreme good and extreme injustices existing in the medical sphere. Some statistics and narratives around health equity are truly horrifying. On the flip side, there are doctors of all colors from all over the world creating a sort of social movement within medicine to make a change, which I find extremely impressive and promising.
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PHOTO BY KRISTIE DEAN
How do health and institutionalized racism collide in your work with the YES for CURE Program at Dana Farber and the Harvard Cancer Center? The fight for proportional research inclusion, primarily geographic and racial, is viewed as a way to combat institutionalized racism in medical treatment. Genetic cancer research is the foundation upon which physicians build their future cancer treatments. If research is not equipped with a diverse study population, then future genetic treatments may not have the capability to treat all populations equally. We are quantifying the disparity in research inclusion specifically for prostate cancer genetic research.
