"My name is Chris Rees.
I'm a fourth year MD-PhD candidate here at Dartmouth and I'm doing my PhD in Jane Hill's
Lab which is at the Thayer School of Engineering.
My area of is interest in terms of research is in developing a novel diagnostic for the
characterization of antibiotic resistance patterns in highly resistant species of bacteria.
My particular area of interest is carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae which refers to a group
of organisms that have acquired resistance to most, if not all, commercially available
antibiotic drugs.
Those bacteria now are still relatively rare as bacterial infections go but every year
they're proportionately representing more and more of all infections that you would
see.
In those cases, it's really important that you treat appropriately, as quickly as you
possibly can because the longer a patient goes without appropriate treatment the more
likely they are to suffer long term consequences of their infection.
Right now it takes between three days and a week to get a definitive diagnosis plus
antibiotic susceptibility profiling and we're hoping to take the steps that would lead to
a diagnostic that could do that in a matter of minutes if not hours.
I'm originally from Massachusetts.
I dabbled in a little bit of everything and never became really great at anything.
I think I was the kid who my parents tried to push me to try a little bit of everything.
I did basketball and baseball and lacrosse and all those sort of things.
I learned to play the piano and the violin.
I don't think I necessarily retained any of those skills but it was fun to have the variety.
And maybe that's where my need for variety in life comes from.
We do everything from microbiology to analytical chemistry to using different computational
techniques to analyze data sets.
It's nice to come in on a given day and know that you'll get to do one thing you're interested
in and then the next day you'll get to do something completely different that you're
also interested in.
In terms of research, I really came to appreciate that it was something that I enjoyed doing
and discovering things that have not been discovered before.
When you take a step back and think about it, it's actually a pretty profound opportunity
to get to do something neat.
It can definitely seem to be pretty gargantuan task when you first encounter just the data
set that we generate.
The really great thing about this environment is because we're so multi-disciplinary we
have people in the lab with really diverse backgrounds.
We have engineers, computer scientists, biostatisticians, microbiologists.
If I have a question or am approaching a problem that I've not approached before, the odds
are really good that there's going to be someone in the group who can help me or push me in
the right direction.
I think the ultimate goal would be to develop a tool that could very rapidly determine what
kind of organism a patient with pneumonia has and what kind of therapies they're likely
to respond to.
Right now the amount of time that it takes is not sufficient for a lot of people who
are very sick.
Hopefully, what we do can help to cut down on the time to make that diagnosis from about
a week to a few hours.
I guess one thing that I've come to appreciate about both research and medicine to a certain
extent, is that those careers are ones that are not likely to stagnate.
You have the opportunity to do something new every day.
We are not going to be able to answer all of the world's problems in the next generation
or probably not the one after that or the one after that.
If you have questions that you really feel you want to answer, the odds are good that
you'll have the opportunity to try to answer them.
A lot of what we know about the human body has been around for hundred years and every
couple weeks a new drug comes about or a new procedure is developed.
So as much as our core knowledge of medicine is fixed, there's a lot of it that changes
on a decently regular basis.
If you want a career that's going to let you do a number of things and that's going to
keep you engaged and keep you focused on a daily basis, I think either research or medicine
are two really viable options for that."