As a Fulbright Scholar, Fort Worth Medical Student Worked on Cutting-Edge Breast Cancer Research
TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine third-year medical student Sophie Wix shares her experience as a Fulbright Open Study Award recipient at Cambridge.
FORT WORTH – As a fourth-grader, Sophie Wix knew she wanted to be a Fulbright Scholar.
She was inspired by her cousin who studied ballet in Germany as a part of the program.
“I was so drawn to it I knew it was something I wanted to pursue,” Wix said.
Wix, a third-year medical student at TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine, became at Fulbright Scholar when she received the Fulbright Open Study Award in the United Kingdom while finishing up her senior year at University of Southern California in 2018.
“I remember getting the call and I was on the phone with my mom walking home and I saw this strange number calling me,” Wix said. “I just stopped and sat down on a bench and started to cry. I was so excited. I had no idea that it would really happen.”
TCU is celebrating the 75thanniversary of the Fulbright Program by highlighting current and past Fulbright Scholars that are a part of the TCU Horned Frog family.
Wix was the first graduate of USC to receive the prestigious, and coveted, Fulbright Open Study Award in the United Kingdom. Fulbright only selects two students for that award each year.
Her path to becoming a Fulbright Scholar ended up being through medicine, specifically research. She got her first opportunity to delve into research at 16 when she was an intern at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona.
When she arrived at USC two years later, she got the opportunity to work in the Convergent Science Institute in Cancer at USC alongside research professors Peter Kuhn and James Hicks. She studied and helped in developing the proteomics of circulating tumor cells. Those types of tumor cells are key in helping scientists analyze cancer cells at their protein levels. It helps scientists better understand how a tumor interacts with the entire human body over time.
While at USC she had the opportunity to hear Carlos Caldas, Professor of Cancer Medicine at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at University of Cambridge give a presentation at an American Association for Cancer Research conference.
She was amazed by his presentation, but little did she know that she would soon be working alongside him at his research lab in Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar.
“I’ve been really fortunate to work on some cutting-edge research,” Wix said. “He hosted me for a project related to molecularly characterizing patient-derived xenografts as part of a larger clinical trial.”
In Professor Caldas’s lab, she worked with breast cancer patient tumors that were taken out of the primary cancer patient and implanted into mice. They would try different drug treatments on the mice to see which one had a better response at treating the tumor.
“It’s helpful for physicians because once we’ve identified through tests that the treatment the patient is on didn’t work but the treatment that mouse X was on worked to treat the same tumor then a physician would be able to use the molecular characterization data that we collected,” Wix said. “It would show that the patient would have a better response to a certain treatment which could also be useful in treating future patients with similar tumors.”
As a part of receiving her Master of Philosophy in Medical Science at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute under Professor Caldas, she was given an opportunity to present her work at the 65th International Berlin Seminar for Fulbright Scholars in March 2019.
The event brought together more than 550 Fulbright Scholars along with their family and friends.
“It was a huge honor to present our work from the Caldas lab at the Berlin conference,” Wix said. “I was able to share my work with thousands of other Fulbright Scholars from all over Europe.”
Now, she is training to become an Empathetic Scholar ® at the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine, where the approach to medical education is patient-centered and communication is embedded into every part of the curriculum.
The novel approach to medical education resonates with Wix and the values she learned as a Fulbright Scholar.
“Something that we all (Fulbright Scholars) shared was a sense of community, empathy, sensitivity for your fellow man,” Wix said. “Then moving to Texas to come to this school I felt right at home. We’re getting a significant amount of stimulation in the intellectual sense but in addition to that we are being trained to be good humans and genuine empathetic physicians.”