Doctor Shadowing in Cardiothoracic Surgery

Hi, I am Esmarline De León-Peralta, a junior chemical engineering student at The University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. My main goal is to contribute to scientific advancement through biomedical innovation and service. My eagerness to improve the lives of others stems from some of the painful experiences I endured as a child seeing how a brain tumor induced my grandmother’s early death. After this experience, I became engaged in patient care, and research in medicine to find cures, solutions to clinical problems through engineering, and create early detection devices to prevent these diseases. Therefore, I plan on attending medical school to earn a dual MD/PhD degree.

My passion for patient care and understanding of the challenges medicine faces drove me to previously shadow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Dermatology on complex dermatology. For years, I have found an inexplicable joy treating patients and doing research, and this experience reconfirmed my purpose and passion of becoming a physician scientist. I completely empathize with the patient needs, the importance of providing the best health care, and the huge necessity to partake in research developing more treatments and techniques to help people with complicated or unknown diseases.

During the following six months, I will be shadowing the Hon. Raúl García Rinaldi, MD-PhD, a well renowned cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at The Mayagüez Medical Center. To have the opportunity to learn from Dr. García is a privilege to me, since he is very admired and followed by all the people and patients that know about his work or have been treated with him. I am completely eager to acquire as much knowledge as I can from this tremendous physician scientist on my ways of becoming one in the nearer future.