All the faculty seminars were extremely engaging and inspiring, but one that I found particularly interesting was Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg’s talk on precision medicine. Dr. Ginsburg discussed how genomic tools can revolutionize the practice of medicine, and I think the promise of genomic medicine and more interdisciplinary fields in general will definitely be realized in the future. The process of combining gene, protein, and metabolite expression with phenotypic data can allow for a multi-dimensional analysis of health; given the uniqueness of every human system, the clinical applications of more targeted therapeutics and personalized medicine seem endless.
All in all, I was really drawn to how interdisciplinary the field of precision medicine is. One of the main reasons why I am interested in (and plan to major in) biomedical engineering is that it integrates the engineering sciences with biology and medicine, all areas that I no longer see as individual disciplines but more as a collective whole. The different tiers of precision medicine – from the research/discovery to translational science to the clinical or policy side- seem to be a model of what fields of scientific inquiry will be more like in the future. Dr. Ginsburg was very encouraging about how quickly genomic medicine is growing, and opened my eyes to a field that I am definitely interested in exploring and learning more about.
