"My name is Mario Martinez and right now we're at Emory University and I'm a M.D, Ph.D. student
in my research phase.
So I'm from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, which is a small country in South America.
I've always been into sports, so I used to play every sports, you know, even through
high school.
I used to play baseball, soccer, volleyball.
My dad was an electrical engineer for the government of Honduras, so he's a professor.
I was always interested in science, per se.
Like I always liked my classes in high school, I was always interested in physics and biology
and you know, I was good in chemistry and in math.
You know, I was the typical, you know, good A type student in high school.
My mission in the lab is to cure heart disease, and particularly [INAUDIBLE] disease and myocarditis.
Particularly in children, we're trying to figure out if there is a way to target therapies
for children.
Very, very little is known, and very little treatments are available.
If we could just develop something, that even if it's not exactly what we develop, but you
know, a little piece that get applied, you know?
We see patients with myocarditis do better in the long term.
I would say that would bring me a lot of satisfaction.
We have like 12 different team members that are looking at different diseases of the heart.
We're all exploring different techniques.
People always feel supported in our lab and we'd like to keep it that way.
When we bring new people in, you know, we want to make sure that they will fit in with
that culture that we have, which is a culture of collaboration.
And any time that we need something new, the great thing about labs is that it can be acquired
or build it or develop it, you know?
Like if we're doing a new technique, it's like okay, so how do we build this?
You know, a lot of the things that we use are things that haven't been used before,
so that's, you know, something that's also pretty exciting for somebody that's very handy.
What is enjoyable is the end result, you know, when you're like ""in spite of all those things
and all the limitations we had, we're able to tell a story and to show like, okay this
is what we did, this is the thing that we have and this is why you should care.""
When I got to college, I started understudying that you know, there's all this that we know,
but there's also all this that we don't know and I think that's when I first started pursuing
it a little bit more.
And then you know through different chance encounters with professors, one of them was
like 'maybe you should do research', and at this point, I come from Honduras, so you know,
we know very little about research.
There's not a lot of money into research and it's not promoted in schools really so I didn't
even know what it was.
So I was like, 'sure I'll give it a try.'
So I started falling in love with the process, like how I had very good mentors and they
were like 'okay, so this is why we're doing this, can you think about what the next step
would be?
And it just felt like–it's almost like playing with Legos, you know?
You're building things and you're trying to figure out new answers for how these things
work.
And I was just–that was when I was captured with it.
And then upon graduating I decided like I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I'm going
to take a research position for a year or two while I figure things out and then after
that, I decided maybe I want to do this as a career, you know?
So it was definitely a process, it wasn't oh, since I was eight, you know, this is what
I wanted to do.
It was definitely something that developed and you know opportunities kept presenting
themselves and I just kept taking them.
I was always good at math, but we do very little math actually, which is one of those
things that people realize like–I always, I used to joke with my wife, like our math
is complex it doesn't have numbers any more.
It's just letters and symbols and equations.
I think about my PhD as developing this tool box that allows me to explore even more things
and the second fold would be like to develop something that's actually translatable.
The reality is that we all as humans will at some point suffer some disease, you know
and it's just so complex to me, you know like we spent years and years, for example, knowing
about heart attacks, you know and we have all this research and still we can't you know,
it's still a problem, we still have millions of people that suffer it in the United States
and in other parts of the world.
So I don't think it was a particular person or something like that, it was just like I'm
always interested in, you know, like it's human suffering, you know?
I think that if you're considering a career for like medical research, the great thing
is that you'll never be bored, you know?
There's so much complexity, so many techniques, so many diseases that you can explore, you
know?
Literally you will never have enough time to do everything that you want to do.
So for people that are curious, this is a great field.
You will always be learning new techniques, you'll always be doing something different,
you know?
You'll always feel you're doing something for society, you know?
It's always like a great satisfaction knowing that you're trying to advance where we are
today, to make the future a little bit better.
I would say that people that are curious, you know, this is like a great fit, you know,
and I hope you pursue it."