Interview with Anisha Jain

About Anisha

Anisha Jain is a third-year MD/PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut in just three years, where she was in the honors program and conducted independent research on non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.

Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, Anisha was surrounded by art and science. Her father, a liver pathologist at Yale, introduced her to the microscopic world at a young age, sparking her fascination with how beautiful cellular structures were. As a painter, Anisha found herself drawn to the intersection of medicine and art, shown in the vibrant colors in her father's histology slides.

The turning point came in high school when Anisha met an MD/PhD mentor through her science research program. Watching this physician-scientist follow patients from clinic to lab, seeing diseases in people and then modeling them in animals to develop new therapeutics, showed Anisha a path she couldn't imagine living without.

After graduating early due to the pandemic, Anisha spent two transformative gap years as a research technician at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, working in nanoscale medicine and tissue engineering.

Anisha's research centers on the liver, particularly women's health and liver disease. Her PhD project focuses on understanding how the maternal liver can grow and resize during pregnancy, mechanisms that could help find new approaches to liver transplantation and cancer treatment.

For aspiring physician-scientists, Anisha emphasizes the power of flexibility and serendipity. Her advice: have direction, but stay open to unexpected opportunities—sometimes the best decisions are the ones you never planned to make.

My favorite quote from the interview:

But, I feel like things, serendipity, works out in ways that you cannot predict.

Watch the video or continue reading to learn more about Anisha's story.

Transcript

Chelsy Do: Thank you again for taking the time to get on this call and sit down and meet with me. I know your schedule must be really busy, so thank you for making that time. All right, if you're ready, we can begin the interview.

Anisha Jain: I'm happy to. Sure.

Anisha's Educational Background

Chelsy Do: I wanted to begin talking about you and your background. Can you tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and what your early life was like?

Anisha Jain: So, I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. My dad is a liver GI pathologist at Yale. So, I had a lot of early exposure to medicine and science. My mom was a real estate agent, but neither of my parents really pushed me into anything. I think I did a lot of art growing up. I've been a watercolor painter for many, many years. A lot of these paintings in my apartment are mine. So, I think I always had a creative edge to me and loved art.

And then I think I just started seeing the intersection between medicine and art, especially since my dad is a pathologist, and seeing his histology slides, I loved the colors behind it.

So, he started teaching me more about form and function. When I was younger, he'd have a double microscope, and when I was 5 years old, he would start pointing out: this is what a cell looks like and this is what fat looks like. And from that early age, it kind of bred my curiosity into how these pretty things were actually making up my body.

Throughout the years I was a big reader. So, I started reading my dad's early medical textbooks or whatever journals would come to the house. In high school, I was actually in a science research program (I went to public school but we had a program). I would find a mentor every year and take on a science project, and in my sophomore and junior year, my mentor was an MD/PhD. And that was the first exposure I had to an MD/PhD.

So, I originally thought I wanted to be a doctor, but then my mentor—it was so cool to see... I would follow her to clinic and then the same patients that she was seeing, she would try to model their diseases in animals and try to come up with a pathophysiological understanding or come up with new therapeutics on the back end.

And after seeing it work that way, I couldn't imagine not doing that whole flow of seeing a patient and then coming up with the back end of how to help them through this cycle. So, I kind of kept that in the back of my mind and that was when I knew I wanted to be an MD/PhD, and every subsequent experience after that kind of reaffirmed that was what I wanted to do.

Chelsy Do: Gotcha. How did your family or cultural background kind of shape your journey into research?

Anisha Jain: So definitely because my dad was a physician, I had a lot of early exposure and he was at an academic university. He was at Yale. So, I had a lot of exposure to MD/PhD life. That definitely shaped my journey heavily. But yeah, not much more than that I think.

Chelsy Do: And could you tell me more about your undergraduate experience?

Anisha Jain: I went to University of Connecticut for undergrad and I was in the honors program, so I had to do an honors thesis. But I went to a conference with my dad when I was in high school, and at that conference, I sat next to a physician who kind of offhand said something about noticing some pattern of NASH in kids—non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.

And after that I kind of always had it in the back of my head, and I was 16-17, but I was just looking at PubMed trying to find research articles. Then, when I got to college, I'd already read enough about this disease that I found a professor who was working in nutrition and I proposed to him a project. And then through that, I actually applied for my own undergrad funding and I got $4,000 to run my own mouse model study.

So, I think that was probably the most significant thing I did in my undergrad research career: coming up with a research problem and then executing it, from designing the problem to writing it up and presenting it. That question came from an MD, so the only way that I would ever come up with questions like that was if I were an MD/PhD and I could see patients, come up with the pitfalls, and answer it through basic science.

But, also another thing about my undergrad career was I graduated in three years. It was because it was kind of during the COVID-19 pandemic and all of my lab classes were virtual. So, I just decided I had all my requirements done and I knew I wanted to do MD/PhD. So, I decided to graduate early and I did my gap years after that, which I think is one of your next questions, right?

Anisha's MD/PhD Journey

Chelsy Do: Yes! Could you go more into what you did during your gap years?

Anisha Jain: Yeah. After I graduated in three years, I originally was trying to go straight through, but I serendipitously had two gap years and I would recommend it to anybody. I found my job through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is a philanthropic organization. I think 86 of their investigators are Nobel Laureates. So, it's a really great institute that funds a lot of really good research.

But I found a job as a research technician for them at the Bhatia Lab. So, that lab was involved in nanoscale medicine and tissue engineering. So, mostly in the bioengineering space which is something I was not familiar with, but they were doing work on liver tissue which is something I was interested in. So I worked there for two years and I had the best time.

I worked with some really great graduate students and scientists. They even sent me to Paris to work at the Institute Pasteur for a little bit.

So overall, I think that gap years, being a full-time researcher and just learning as many new skills as possible was the best thing I could have done for myself. And then also just giving yourself a little break between school and then more school because, MD/PhD, once you start it, it's never going to stop. That is the longest journey and path ever which I love, but it was nice to just be a person out of school for a little bit.

Chelsy Do: Gotcha. I know this is a classic interview question, but why did you choose to pursue both the MD and PhD, and why wasn't one enough for you?

Anisha Jain: I mean, that's still a good question, and something that everyone should ask themselves before going down this path because if you think you can be fulfilled by one degree, then don't do both. It's such a long hard path, but I think before I wanted to do MD and then seeing the MD/PhD workflow... I was like I can't imagine my life going any other way.

I really loved science and I loved medicine and I feel like for me, I just saw that, the kinds of questions I was interested in, I would only be able to ask those questions if I was a clinician and I was seeing this stuff up front. And the only way I'd be able to answer these questions for me was just not through clinical trials and clinical medicine as I was interested in the basic pathophysiology and coming up with therapeutics through those mechanisms. So, I think that for me, I just couldn't see my life working any other way.

This isn't the best for everybody, but I just wanted to sit at the intersection where I was able to see patients and come up with therapeutics. So, it just felt natural.

Chelsy Do: Gotcha. Could you describe what kind of projects you've worked on before? Did you just finish your second year of medical school?

Anisha Jain: Yes, I just finished my second year of medical school and now I'm in my PhD, but I've worked on a lot of projects over the years, a lot of different facets of liver biology.

So, the liver is kind of like the center of everything I've been interested in. Growing up, I first started out with liver cancer in my early years in high school, and then I was looking into iron storage disorders of the liver. So hemochromatosis and iron deficiency anemia and then I was interested in metabolic disorders. So, fatty liver disease in non-obese patients and how that works and how can we therapeutically intervene. And then, in my gap years, I was particularly interested in circadian rhythm in the liver. So, how does different times of day affect the metabolism and the immune function of the liver?

Are we more susceptible to certain infections? And do certain drugs get metabolized differently at different times of day? And the answer was yes to all of that. Now, I'm particularly interested in the sexual dimorphism of the liver. So, how are male and female livers—why do males and females get completely different diseases? How does estrogen mediate that? How is the maternal liver different?

So, my particular interest is really in women's health and liver disease.

Chelsy Do: Gotcha. Do you know what your project for your PhD is yet or are you still in the process of determining that?

Anisha Jain: Yeah, so I will be working on particularly one of the phenomena of the maternal liver is that it can grow and resize down back to the metabolic need of the mom. So basically, during pregnancy, it'll expand, and then after pregnancy, it'll involute back to its original size.

I'm really curious about how that regenerative mechanism works and how involution works. I think that this can teach us both about how to supplement liver transplant for the growth and the involution would help with liver cancer and how do we restrict tumor growth. So working with the maternal liver hypertrophy mechanism is what I'm going to be working on for my PhD.

Chelsy Do: You were mentioning that you're interested in women's health specifically. So the MD/PhD offers a lot of career flexibility. Do you know what you want your work week or the split to look like, and what specific specialty you want to choose? I know you're still early in your MD/PhD, but...

Anisha Jain: Yeah, I think it's subject to change because I really did like my OBGYN clerkship, which is something I thought I'd never do, but I think generally right now I'm expecting to do internal medicine and gastroenterology hepatology. But again, it's kind of open.

But, in terms of my work life balance, I think I kind of want to do classic... within a work week maybe two research days, two clinic days, and one scoping day if I were to do GI. So I have a little bit of procedural, surgical, then a little bit of clinic, and then the rest is research. So kind of in that 70/30 split of 70% research, 30% clinic, but that could move around a little bit.

Advice for Aspiring MD/PhDs

Chelsy Do: Awesome. We can move on to the concluding advice portion. First question: Looking back, what do you wish you had known earlier that maybe could have made your journey a little bit smoother?

Anisha Jain: I mean, I'll be honest. I don't think there's anything I wish I knew because the only thing I wish I knew, I guess, was don't put so much pressure on planning things out.

It's always good to have direction. But, I feel like things, serendipity, works out in ways that you cannot predict. So I was not planning on taking any gap years. I was not planning on graduating early. I almost didn't even have Pitt CMU, which is the school I go to right now, on my list originally, and it was the best decision for me. So, kind of just being flexible with opportunities and with yourself—don't be so rigid minded about your timeline because I feel like a lot of premeds, you're always going to be regimented. "I want to hit the MCAT at this time" and "I want to get married at this point and have a baby." Relax and try to have direction, but be open to flexibility.

Chelsy Do: And do you have any advice for... let's start with high school students wanting to go maybe just into STEM or considering a STEM career and preparing for college applications at this point? And do you have any advice for undergraduates considering the MD/PhD?

Anisha Jain: Finding programs, I think, that give you flexibility.

I don't think that there's too much you have to do in high school, just finding a college you like. I feel like honestly big schools are usually good for STEM no matter what because they usually have pretty big programs. They give you a lot of opportunities. But if you're in high school and you just want to get exposure, finding labs to work in or even trying to get on projects to just do a literature review. So, just exposure to science in any way you can is the best way I think to go about it in high school.

Yeah, I think if you're an undergrad and you're honestly just interested in anything like STEM, but specifically MD/PhD, getting involved in research as early as you can and then also trying not to switch between labs, staying in one lab, whether you like it that much or switch if you don't like it, but just having some continuity throughout the years.

And then building yourself up as either an independent researcher or just as having a major contributing role. And I think what goes into that is reading literature, understanding the rationale behind experiments because when it actually comes to your applications, you have to be able to explain why you made certain decisions or where you'd go next or when things went wrong. So, just really getting deep into the research and having some part of it that's your own.

Chelsy Do: Awesome, thank you so much. These are all the questions I have. Thank you again for your time, Anisha. Bye.

Anisha Jain: Of course. Yeah. Take care.