Student Life
A Day in the Life
After finishing pre-clinicals, doing my neurology and my obstetrics and gynecology rotations, taking STEP 1, and passing my PhD qualifying exam, I'm now in the thesis phase of the MD-PhD program. For my thesis work, I am in Sam Sternberg's lab in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, where we study the molecular arms race between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. On a typical day I balance planning and running experiments with mentoring the undergraduate and rotation students in the lab, alongside meetings with labmates, collaborators and faculty. The research culture at Columbia has been incredible, with world-class experts in just about any field from virology to structural biology always open to brainstorming ideas.
One of the great strengths of training at Columbia is how accessible the clinical world remains even in the depths of a PhD: clinicians in nearly any specialty are just an email away, and I have been able to reach out to faculty to see patients with them in clinic and to scrub into cases in the OR. That permeability between bench and bedside is invaluable to stay up-to-date in both worlds. I also stay connected to patient care and keep up my clinical skills as a senior clinician at CoSMO, one of the five student-run free clinics, where we care for members of the Washington Heights community. I also co-chair the medical school Honor Code Committee, where we focus on communication and professionalism, and am involved in the MD-PhD student advisory board.
Of course, no graduate program is complete without a life outside the lab, and New York City is one of the best places to spend it. Having been born and raised in California, I was daunted by the idea of living in NYC as I thought access to the outdoors would be limited. While I had to adjust my hobbies (much harder to surf in NYC!), spending time outdoors in the city is tons of fun. I play tennis with fellow MD-PhD students Anton Tung and Sarah Grauman, running and cycling with my labmates before lab, in the Armory relay marathon and in NYRR races such as the NYC Marathon, and even skiing in Central Park after a big snow day. At home I have the good company of my cat Dewey, whom I found in Riverside Park after a tennis match. There’s also incredible opportunities to experience the arts, whether it’s the ballet at Lincoln Center (a special shoutout to the $30-under-30 tickets), Shakespeare in the Park, or same-day Broadway tickets. I also play in a band, Ege and the 2030s, with fellow MD-PhD students. We perform at Coffeehouse, a semesterly party thrown by medical students.
In short, the thesis phase offers flexibility, and the responsibility that comes with it, to create a schedule that serves primarily your thesis research but also clinical and personal interests. It's a demanding phase, but a deeply rewarding one, and Columbia, the MD-PhD program, and my PI have given me the support and the community to make the most of every part of it. My cohort is a second family to me. Last thing, our outgoing director, Dr. Patrice Spitalnik, prided herself on only admitting nice people, so be a nice person!
- Louie Kulber
A Day in the Life
Each day is a brand new day and though that sentiment rang through the chaos of my first two MCY rotations, grad school has been filled with an even greater sense of adventure on the day to day. As with each phase of the program, there are ups and there are downs but (at least so far) this first half of the PhD phase has been a time of immense professional (and personal!) growth in a setting where I get to be guided by the simple (in theory, though not always in practice) pursuit of curiosity.
As a rising second year in the Epidemiology department, the next year will be spent completing my coursework in preparation for the qualifying examination. Courses vary from semester to semester, but the structure of each term stays about the same: take a course on epidemiological theory (What does it mean for something to be a cause of disease? Why do we study things the way we do? How do we draw conclusions and make decisions from an imperfect literature?), a course on epidemiological and biostatistical methods (regression methods, survival models, all the good stuff, etc.), a course to learn skills for academic success (i.e. the at times tedious but very necessary process of writing manuscripts and grants), and (optionally) pursue an interest through an elective (cancer epi, infectious epi, social epi, psych epi – you name it and our spectacular department probably has it). Each week is filled with new and exciting ways to develop my epidemiological foundation – from conducting an in-class study on the association between cortisol and sleep quality to practice molecular epidemiology methods, to researching the origins and dangers of Pacific Islander data aggregation under the AAPI label and presenting recommendations, to delivering a lecture that critically evaluates the controversial association between Tylenol and ASD and highlights where the interpretation of science went wrong, and much more. It has been an absolute privilege to learn from the outstanding professors in our department (and not only outstanding for their brilliant minds, but even more so their genuine passion for teaching) and I look forward to all I will learn in the upcoming year.
Outside of the classroom, there is ample opportunity for research and my personal interests lie in the intersection of chronic disease epidemiology (particularly cancer, but also cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative diseases) and molecular epidemiology (studying disease risk, etiology, and progression at the molecular level). Currently, I’m working with Dr. Jasmine McDonald where I work on multiple projects that all revolve around post-partum breast cancer (PPBC), a specific subset of early-onset breast cancer. We investigate PPBC from different angles – in one project, we take a molecular approach by investigating unique features of the tumor microenvironment, while another project takes an environmental approach by investigating the effects of various personal care products on cancer risk. Beyond pursuing my own research interests, the department also supports various opportunities to broaden my perspective on the implications of our work through seminars and grand rounds with guest speakers covering topics like the politics of the food system to a historical review of censorship and misinformation in the field of public health.
To top it all off, life outside of the PhD in this phase of the program has also been very, very enjoyable. Extracurricular-wise, I absolutely love teaching and have had the opportunity to continue this work through the LangYouth program in my first couple of years, and the Columbia Science Honors Program where I currently co-teach a course with Laura Jenny, a beloved friend and cohort-mate! In fact, most of my free time is spent with my Columbia family (i.e. my cohort <3) whether this be through adventures (often food-motivated) around the city, watch parties and “girls” nights (all are invited; the naming is just convention as the evening usually entails charcuterie boards and tea, of the drinking and talking varieties), and whatever other reasons we come up with to get together and enjoy each other's company :) If it isn’t already obvious, I have been absolutely loving my life as a Columbia MD-PhD student and while I may not always know what each day will bring, the one certain thing is that there is no place I’d rather be than here.
- Kanoe Evile
A Day in the Life
I'm a final-year MD-PhD student at Columbia. I did my thesis work with Benjamin Izar, building CRISPR base-editing screening platforms in primary human T cells that let us test thousands of patient-derived genetic variants implicated in rare immune disorders in parallel and identify the ones that are pathogenic and actionable. The most rewarding part of this, as an MD-PhD student, was learning that the first patients had received diagnoses and precision therapy as a direct result of the work. I defended my thesis in September 2025 and was back on the wards soon after.
The clinical phase at Columbia is split around the PhD, which I think is one of the best design choices in the program. You begin with the 18-month fundamentals curriculum, complete several rotations of the Major Clinical Year (MCY), take Step 1 of the boards, and then move to the lab. When you come back to the clinic, as I did last October, you finish the remaining clerkships and then move into sub-internships, electives, Step 2 of the boards, and residency applications. Day to day, inpatient blocks mean a 5 a.m. alarm, in the hospital by 6:30 to pre-round on your patients, team rounds by 8, then notes, orders, calls to consultants, and whatever patient care and procedures you can participate in until sign-out. Outpatient-heavy rotations run on a different timeline: an 8 a.m. start, dozens of patients a day, and out at a reasonable hour. The breadth of training here is hard to match — I've cared for patients with rare genetic disorders receiving gene therapy, a direct link to my PhD work, and patients on cutting-edge immunotherapy for otherwise intractable cancers, and I've scrubbed into open-heart surgery.
The return to full-time clinical work after the PhD is an intensive rite of passage for every MD-PhD student, but the critical thought and eye for data you develop during your PhD translates extremely well to your duties the hospital. At a major academic center like NYP, there are constant opportunities to build translational science into patient care, and it is good practice for the balancing act ahead as an early career physician scientist. Your scientific training can also continue once you're back in clinic. My lab is a five-minute walk from the hospital, so I can round in the morning, catch lab meeting in person or virtually, and meet in the evening with the students I still mentor. One of my papers went out for review in the middle of a clerkship; during another I gave Department of Medicine grand rounds on my PhD research; and I've spoken at conferences in Hawaii, San Francisco, and Seattle while on rotations. Now at the end of medical school, I'm given a degree of independence in patient care that has made me confident about the leap to residency next year.
Outside the hospital, I live in Washington Heights with my wife, a pediatric cardiology fellow here. We spend our time outside work exploring the city with friends, visiting our families (both in the tri-state area), and taking day trips to New Jersey and the Hudson Valley on weekends. New York is the perfect place to do an MD-PhD, because truly you never run out of new experiences, and there's absolutely nowhere better in New York than at Columbia!
- Zach Walsh