Summer Undergraduate Research Program - Fred Hutchinson ...

Extra Personal Statement #11
When I began work on my Masters of Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, I
thought I knew what epidemiology was. I envisioned my future as an epidemiologist involving
outbreak investigations and lab work. One year later, as I observed the meeting of a scientific
advisory committee, convened to brainstorm ideas for studies to elucidate why breast cancer
incidence rates were elevated in Marin County, California, my understanding of epidemiology
was transformed, as was my vision of my future. In listening to the epidemiologists on the
committee, including Dr. Janet Daling, discuss their own cancer studies and the epidemiologic
process I began to understand how powerful epidemiology is – how a properly designed casecontrol
study can yield results that point towards biological pathways and how the findings of a
cohort study can guide medical practice. I was particularly inspired by Dr. Daling’s work
describing the associations between hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer by
histological type. I knew then that I wanted to be a cancer epidemiologist. I knew then that
cancer epidemiology appealed not only to my analytical nature, but also to my desire to focus my
professional efforts in a field that had societal relevance. I knew then that I wanted to design and
carry out my own epidemiological studies and collaborate with others to enhance pre-existing
studies. I knew then that I wanted to do cancer research in an academic setting that encouraged
creative scientific thinking to solve public health questions.
During my second year of MPH studies I put my new-found inspiration into practice. With my
Master’s thesis I investigated the hypothesis that population misestimation artificially elevated
breast cancer incidence rates in Marin County, California; I used Poisson regression to compare
breast cancer incidence rates based on population counts from the 2000 Census to breast cancer
incidence rates based on population projections for the year 2000 projected from the 1990
Census. I found that population projections for Marin County had significantly underestimated
the size of the population of women aged 45-64, and that this underestimation had been
sufficient to significantly increase the estimated incidence rate of breast cancer in Marin County
in the late 1990s. Following the completion of my MPH in epidemiology, I spent several months
at the Marin County Department of Health reworking this research and preparing a manuscript
for publication (Journal of XX, June XXXX). With this publication I asserted that the extensive
efforts devoted to cancer surveillance research lose some of their utility when inaccurate
population projections must be relied upon for timely reporting of incidence and mortality data.
In the fall of XXXX, I accepted a position as an epidemiologist at the Northern California
Cancer Center (NCCC) under Dr. XX. Since joining the NCCC I have had the privilege to work
with data from the Bay Area Women’s Health Study and the Northern California Breast Cancer
Collaborative Family Registry, both designed to examine breast cancer risk in understudied
minority populations. My most significant project with the NCCC thus far has been a casecontrol
analysis investigating the association between migration history and breast cancer risk in
Hispanic women (Journal of XX, December XXXX); for this research project I performed all
literature review, data cleaning, and data analysis, and contributed significantly to the
preparation of the final manuscript. I currently have several additional projects in various stages
of development, including a descriptive analysis of differences in rates of participation in a
breast cancer family registry by race/ethnicity, and an analysis of the variation in prevalence and
effect of reproductive risk factors for breast cancer in a multiethnic population. My role at the
NCCC has also included managing the genomics database for the organization’s breast cancer
family registry; this responsibility has not only allowed me to revisit and apply my
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