Hi, my name is Richard Possemato. I'm an Associate Professor of Pathology at NYU School of Medicine. Each PhD student when they come here is matched up with a faculty mentor. With all of my graduate students, I meet with them once a week, we discuss their projects, the progress they've made, what they're going to be doing for the next week.
What I like about the direct hands-on approach is that you're able to help someone through learning about the scientific process, as well as being able to work on a specific research topic that is of mutual interest to answer a really key question. And in biomedical research, it's not just about learning how to do science, you're actually doing science in the program.
The research that we do in my laboratory focuses on understanding how cancer cells acquire the nutrients that they need to grow and form tumors, and then how to use that information to target cancer. And also to understand other disease states that might be related to things that we learn in cancer that we can apply in other areas. When you discover something new and you say, "Oh, maybe this may be something that a pharmaceutical company can use to make a drug or a doctor can use to inform their treatments?" That hope that what we do is really impactful to patients is is really one of the more rewarding aspects of doing this work.
Our lab culture has a team mentality where everyone is working on closely related projects, and we can build off of each other and learn from each other to each drive our individual projects forward. We also try to have a lot of social activities and to celebrate birthdays, and to celebrate people getting married. And so when we try to create a family culture. I've had several students start their PhD with me and I've watched their journey as they've grown as scientists and have graduated. And it's really amazing to see how good they are when they're done and and how much how adept they are at asking scientific questions and really thinking about science by the time they're finished with the program.
If you're a curious person, and you want to figure out how things work, and you want the question to be new every day, then doing a PhD in Biomedical Science is one of the most interesting and rewarding things that you can do. Because you're you're coming in to work every day and you're trying to figure out a problem that no one else knows the answer to and there aren't very many jobs where you get to do that. And at the same time, if you learn something, it'll have an impact on how people think about the world and can have an impact on medicine.
