If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, my career path has never been linear. And I have no regrets. The longer, less traveled path has allowed me to meet interesting people, and to trial different experiences that have only made me more steadfast in my pursuit of academic surgery as a surgeon scientist committed to improving our understanding of thyroid cancer and optimizing patient outcomes through innovation and discovery.
I self-identify in a number of ways. I am a surgeon. I am a woman, and was just the seventh woman to finish the Halsted residency program in general surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine. I am Latina; my father and his family are from Guatemala. I am an immigrant, born in Montreal prior to moving to upstate New York when I was a child. I am LGBT. I have embraced my intersectionality and view it as an extraordinary privilege, as it allows me to understand more dimensions of life, which inform my strategic vision for the scientific community. Most important, I have come to be unafraid, vested to lift others who still feel disempowered in a field like academic surgery and academic medicine, which are hierarchical, white, and heteronormative.