© ROB LARSONIn 2002, Lisa Boyette was a first-year medical student at the University of Virginia (UVA) when her 14-year-old brother, Jon, was taken to the emergency room. She rushed to see him. His skin had yellowed with jaundice as his immune system destroyed his red blood cells, a condition called autoimmune hemolytic anemia. “He was so weak and so young,” Boyette recalls. It was the first time he had been gravely ill, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Meanwhile, Boyette was training for her MD/PhD. She wanted to be a doctor, as well as a scientist who could affect patients’ lives through research. But when she couldn’t find a project she was passionate about at UVA, she opted to finish her PhD research at the National Institutes of Health with bioengineer Rocky Tuan, now at the University of Pittsburgh. In Tuan’s group, Boyette discovered a way to make larger numbers of differentiated bone and cartilage cells from stem cells by using low-oxygen conditions, mimicking the cells’ in vivo environment.1 Her unorthodox path through the MD/PhD program impressed Tuan. “She never gave up,” he says.
Boyette supplemented her research with a science policy fellowship investigating new ways of tackling medical problems. In 2009, in ...
