Sarah Kerns, PhD, MPH
Graduation Year: 2007
Advisor: McGarry, Thomas
Current Position: Associate Professor, Radiation Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin
Sarah Kerns grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee and did her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Sarah joined the DGP in 2002 and worked with Dr. Thomas McGarry in the Department of Medicine. She is currently an Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
What made you want to go to graduate school?
I worked in a plant biology lab when I was an undergrad, and I really enjoyed it. Long term, I knew I wanted to do research and be my own boss, so when my undergrad advisor suggested that my options were either medical school or graduate school, I chose graduate school. I didn’t really over-think it!
What brought you to Northwestern and the IGP/DGP?
IGP was one of the few integrated programs at the time. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to study, so the interdisciplinary nature of the program and the many options for research were appealing. It was also nice to be in Chicago - I’m very much a city person.
What did you study in graduate school?
My advisor was in the Department of Medicine (Cardiology), but his lab focused mainly on developmental and cancer biology, which is what I studied. I was the first graduate student in the lab, and it was a small lab, so I got lots of attention and got along well with my lab mates, which I appreciated. Although I came to graduate school more interested in translational research, my project was really a basic science project about proteins that control cell cycle and prevent genomic instability. It was a great experience and taught me how to design and conduct a research study with scientific rigor - the same skills I use every day, even though my current field of research is much different.
What did you study in your postdoc?
I wanted to do more translational/clinical research, so first I actually went and got an MPH at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I next worked for a community-based organization in India on a population health study and learned to appreciate the skills needed to design and conduct research in the "real world" rather than the lab. After that, I did a postdoc in genetic epidemiology and pulled it all together. I used my cancer biology background as well as my epidemiology/biostatistics experience to investigate genetic risk factors for cancer treatment outcomes.
What are your current research and/or teaching interests? How have they changed over time?
My job is mostly research, probably 90% of my time, which I love. I do a little bit of teaching for the radiation biology course attended by residents in preparation for their board exam, and I enjoy mentoring students who are interested in research. I just moved to MCW, and I enjoy being in a clinical department because it allows me to focus primarily on translational research with access to patients and wonderful clinical collaborators. My research is still pretty in line with what I did as a postdoc. I perform genetic and other biomarker studies in patients to investigate side effects of cancer treatments—mostly radiation but also chemotherapy. A goal of this work is to personalize cancer care by identifying patients most susceptible to developing cancer treatment toxicity. Another important goal is to identify biologic targets for interventions that can protect normal tissues from damage during cancer treatment. I work closely with basic science collaborators to follow up interesting candidates from my clinical genetic association studies in animal and cell culture models to try to figure out what they do. So I am coming back a little to more basic research, where my PhD and lab training is very helpful.
How did Northwestern prepare you for your current career?
The education content was of course important, learning core concepts of cancer biology. In general, it was a high-quality education and outstanding hands-on training. I learned about how to identify important questions, how to formulate hypotheses, how to design experiments. Overall, I was trained how to do research, and the same skills apply whether at the bench or in a clinical setting.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I believe there is real potential to help cancer patients and survivors, and I find this translational potential very motivating. I’m not sure if they realize it, but the patients who agree to participate in my research studies are my biggest motivators. They have nothing to gain personally, but they believe in the potential of the study to help other patients in the future. That they would donate their time to this research is incredibly encouraging. I also find the personal connections very rewarding. I have a lot of collaborations and do a lot of team science, and this includes lots of conferences, travel, and meeting new people. Working with collaborators who have different expertise and skills always makes for a better study and more enjoyable time doing it.
What is the most challenging part of your job?
Trying to get grants funded! Also getting negative results. Even if those negative results are definitive and informative because the study was designed well, it can be disappointing to realize your hypothesis was wrong. But every study, if designed well, can also point in new and exciting directions even if the first idea wasn’t quite right. So that keeps me encouraged to continue on.
What advice would you give to current students interested in pursuing careers in academics?
It’s good to be flexible—you may have to adapt your interests towards what can get funded and what is clinically or scientifically important. You also have to be persistent—most grants don’t get funded, and most hypotheses are wrong. And even when studies go really well, it takes a long time to move from a discovery to something that can help patients. You have to be OK with small failures and keep the big picture in mind to stay motivated.
Any final advice for students?
Something I didn’t realize as a student is that there are a million different directions you can go in after getting your PhD. After I graduated, I couldn’t see myself running a lab and felt like, “What have I done?” It seemed like a big risk to shift towards the MPH. In addition, some of that hesitation was probably feeling like I wasn’t really competent to run a lab at that time. My postdoc really helped with that, giving me more independence and confidence in managing my own projects. In the end, I do run a lab! It’s mostly clinical and computational, not a wet lab, but I get to come up with exciting ideas and conduct studies that I hope will someday help people faced with cancer.