By Elyssa Nguyen, University of California San Diego
About Me
I grew up in San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley in Southern California and despite growing up in quieter cities, I was always surrounded by a lot of laughter and loud noise. I have a lot of childhood memories with my huge family of 30+ cousins whether we were outside exploring or at a family party loading our plates with homemade Vietnamese food. These days although I’m farther away from home, I’m a Human Biology student at UC San Diego, and when I’m not buried in coursework, you’ll probably find me dragon boat paddling with the UCSD Dragon Boat Team, journaling, or trying whatever new restaurant or cafe my friends have discovered that week. I’m passionate about food (eating it, mostly, though cooking is a close second), about my family, and about being introspective with a notebook in hand. My dream day is actually laying on a large field of grass with no deadlines, and just a notebook and pencil to write out my thoughts.
What I’m less sure about is what comes next. I keep circling back to research as a path, but I haven’t fully committed to MD, MD/PhD, or graduate school, and every mentor I talk to in academia seems to have a different opinion about which one I should pick. What I do know though is that I’m drawn to medicine because physicians carry a unique kind of responsibility. They’re trusted, legally and ethically, to diagnose what may be ambiguous, to physically intervene when a disease or injury threatens someone’s life, and to hold that trust with care. Rare diseases especially fascinate me as a wise professor (shoutout Professor Randolph Hampton @ UCSD!!!) once told me that rare diseases are rare opportunities to change someone’s life, because solving even one of them can change someone’s world and that person could be someone’s parent, sibling, or best friend. But I also love research, precisely because there’s still so much we don’t understand about the human body. Some days I imagine myself as the kind of physician-scientist who moves fluidly between the lab bench and the patient’s bedside. Other days, I just want to keep learning and figure out the rest later. Outside of all those career decisions, my personal dream is simpler. To travel the world with my family, eat far too much good food along the way, and live while helping others live a healthy, sustainable life.
The Project: Chasing the Mystery of Alzheimer’s Disease
This summer, that search for answers brought me to a disease that has touched my own family, Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia, a term that describes a group of symptoms, memory loss, confusion, difficulty thinking clearly, caused by ongoing decline in brain function. AD alone accounts for roughly 60 to 70% of all dementia cases worldwide, meaning somewhere between 0.7 and 0.9% of the entire global population is currently living with it (WHO, 2026). The numbers only get more grave with the number of people over 65 with Alzheimer’s or related dementias is projected to climb to nearly 13.8 million by 2060 unless we find better ways to prevent or treat it (Rajan et al., 2021), and the number of cases doubles every five years past the age of 65 (CDC, 2023).
The frustrating part is that so much of why this happens is still a mystery. We know AD is linked to age, diet, and lifestyle, but the underlying biology and the actual mechanisms inside our cells that go wrong, is still unknown. And without understanding the mechanism, it’s incredibly hard to design a therapeutic that actually works.
This summer, I’m assisting a postdoctoral researcher with two projects exploring different aspects of AD, one investigating a potential link between cancer biology and AD, and another exploring a connection between AD and a blood disorder, CHIP (Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminate Potential). CHIP occurs when blood stem cells acquire genetic mutations that are associated with significant health issues. Being able to contribute even a small piece to the larger effort to understand this disease that has affected people in my life, means a lot to me, even if it’s just for one summer.
Crossing an Ocean for Answers
To work on this project, I am travelling to Daejeon, South Korea, to KAIST’s Graduate School for Medical Science and Engineering. My goal is to learn new lab techniques to expand my skill set in a completely different research environment. My hope is that by bringing these new skills and new perspectives back home, it will help me solidify what I want to do in the future. I’ve only been here a day, and I’m already amazed by how much overlap there is between labs across the world. Funnily enough, even the mice in this lab came from the same Jackson Laboratory supplier I’d recognize back home alongside all the many differences in how a lab here runs day to day.
I’ll be honest, I’m extremely nervous. This isn’t my usual research area (I’m used to otolaryngology), and I barely know any Korean, which made me hesitant to talk to anyone at all during my first days here. I actually walked thirty minutes in the heat at one point just to avoid having to speak to someone to buy a transit card for the bus. Eventually the heat won, and I caved, but that small lesson taught me that it’s okay to not know the language, and it’s okay to ask for help. Admitting what you don’t know is half the work of learning. This is true in any environment, not just research!
That’s really what I’m hoping to get out of this summer, the discomfort of being a beginner again, in a new field and a new country, and choosing to lean into it instead of away from it. My plan is to start conversations even when they’re clunky, explore neighboring cities on weekends to understand the culture beyond the lab, keep detailed notes on the techniques I’m learning, and pick up as much Korean as I can in the time I have not because I’ll be fluent by the end of the summer, but because I want to give this opportunity my all. I’m sure it will be an uncomfortable experience getting to that point but I can’t wait to see what this summer has to offer!
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