Ethan Tieu: Trailblazing in Research and Medicine
GOLDWATER SCHOLAR, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
At his core, University of Miami junior Ethan Tieu is still the same child who delighted over the tangible possibilities of building blocks. LEGOs are still one of his hobbies. A decade later Tieu is still interested in building blocks, only now he’s looking at the building blocks of life in research labs. A dual major in neuroscience and computer science, he has already co-authored a research paper and been named a Goldwater Scholar, one of the most prestigious scholarships in research.
Tieu also had the opportunity to shadow on the clinical side of a lab that studies Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disorder (CMT), a currently incurable neuromuscular disease about which he wrote his first published research paper. The patients Tieu interacted with at the lab moved him, prompting his decision to pursue a career in medicine, though he also hopes to get a PhD.
LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT
The interplay between the MD and PhD realms of Tieu’s life culminated in his most recent project. As part of a pilot study, the young scholar created a computer program that can reliably predict whether a patient with any medical issue will need to visit the hospital within the next week. The process began with a strong data set collected from a company specializing in pulmonary care. Tieu then programmed the computer to make predictions based on the data, a process known as machine learning. Throughout the program’s creation, he also received insight from researchers and medical doctors.
WHAT HE SAYS
“Research is like going behind the curtains. What can you do to make things better? And then medicine is the application of that,” Tieu says. “Without medicine, a lot of biological research won’t go anywhere…. So, if you want to touch people, if you want to influence health and human beings and lives, you need medicine to follow research. On the other hand, if you have medicine in isolation, without research, there’s only so many therapies you can apply. “It’s the same LEGO feeling, where you take a pile of nothing and you build something that people appreciate. In walking this path – going from someone who only wanted to do research projects I was given, to wanting to do research that affects people through an MD or PhD, and now through wanting to build things that address really interesting, creative questions – I felt my life come full circle.”