From Scientific Questions to a Future in Medicine
For Mansi Patel, questions about health and access began well before medical school. Born in Ohio, she spent portions of her childhood in places as different as Childress, Texas, and Canada, experiences that exposed her to communities with different health care resources and helped shape her interest in the forces that influence health beyond the walls of a clinic.
Now a first-year M.D./M.P.H. student at UT Southwestern, Ms. Patel is pursuing those questions from several directions at once, exploring how clinical medicine, scientific research, and public health can work together to improve care.
Part of that path led through the Summer Undergraduate Research Internship in Kidney Disease, or SURISKD, which she joined in summer 2025. Working under the mentorship of Drs. Kenneth Chen and Keri Drake, she experienced laboratory research not simply as something she had studied in the classroom, but as a process she could participate in herself.
“One of the most valuable parts of SURISKD was being trusted with hands-on research experiences that pushed me beyond what I had previously done,” she said.
One experience remains particularly vivid: dissecting kidneys from mouse embryos, a procedure she never expected to have the opportunity to perform as a student. Just as important, she began applying laboratory protocols and techniques she had encountered during her undergraduate education to the practical demands of a research project.
That transition helped Ms. Patel view research from a different perspective. Rather than pursuing clinical medicine and laboratory investigation as different paths, she began to understand how one could inform the other.
“SURISKD helped me better understand how research and medicine can inform one another,” she said. “It gave me a clearer picture of what it looks like to move from asking a scientific question to designing experiments that can help answer it.”
The experience also gave her a clearer sense that research could remain part of her career even as she pursued clinical practice. Ms. Patel’s decision to undertake both medical and public health training at UT Southwestern reflects that same interest in approaching health from multiple perspectives.
“The M.D./M.P.H. pathway gives me a way to think about health at multiple levels, from an individual patient’s needs to the larger systems that shape access to care,” she said. “I’m looking forward to finding meaningful ways to bring those perspectives together throughout my training at UT Southwestern.”
For students considering SURISKD, Ms. Patel encourages them not to think of the program as valuable only for those already committed to careers in research. The habits developed through scientific investigation, she said, extend into many aspects of medicine.
“Research builds the foundation for many other aspects of healthcare,” she said. “This is a program that will help develop the critical thinking and technical skills that are transferable to almost any career in medicine.”
For Ms. Patel, SURISKD ultimately did more than introduce new laboratory techniques. It helped connect the scientific questions she was learning to ask with the physician she was beginning to imagine becoming. Now back at UT Southwestern as a medical student, she is continuing to explore that connection, this time with patients, populations, and a future career in medicine increasingly coming into view.