Katarina “Katie” Stoffers ’15 spent 12 weeks this past summer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
She worked in Division of Hemostasis and Thrombosis under the direction of Dr. Price Blair’s mentor at Harvard, Rob Flaumenhaft. Dr. Blair teaches both undergraduate biology and in the College’s Doctor of Physical Therapy Program.
“Dr. Blair helped prepare me for this internship,” said Katie, a biomedical science major and international relations minor scheduled to graduate in January.
Katie was working on a project to improve an FDA-approved drug that limits arterial clotting, but doesn’t have the side effect of causing brain bleeding.
“I had a great time,” she said. “I didn’t find the lab work hard at all.”
The internship further convinced her of her interest in cardiology and hematology and possibly becoming a heart surgeon.
Katie has applied to several medical schools for next fall, and if her determination is any indication, she should have no trouble.
A Westover Honors fellow, Katie will finish her LC degree in three and a half years. She is even taking more courses than she needs this semester including a graduate-level neuroscience class in the College’s Doctor of Physical Therapy Program (DPT) and biochemistry at Sweet Briar College.
She has also been helping out in the DPT cadaver lab this fall.
“Katie is a wonderful student to teach,” Dr. Blair said. “She’s genuinely excited to learn and she asks great questions. Those are two attributes you need to be a good research scientist.”
In addition to her full course load, Katie has done two study abroad trips through the College to France her freshman year and South Africa in the summer of 2013. The South Africa trip confirmed her desire to practice medicine in developing countries so much so that she spent her last winter break in at a hospital in Tanzania through a program called Gap Medics.
In her rare free time, Katie likes to read and do hot yoga, but mostly she loves to prepare for her future career.
She doesn’t plan to take a break before medical school but hopes to take classes for fun back home in Long Island, N.Y., like economics and psychology. She thinks it would be great to take an EMT course, go back to work in the Harvard lab or maybe head back to Tanzania for the summer.
