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Tam M. Nguyen
Tam Nguyen's early decision to study medicine was a direct consequence of her childhood in Saigon in the wake of the Vietnam War. As a young child, she remembers walking past poor Vietnamese citizens suffering on the steps of hospitals with no care available to them. Nguyen vowed to be able to help one day.
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Tam M. Nguyen
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Photo: David Graham
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Her concern was also personal. Nguyen watched her parents and her aunts and uncles develop high blood pressure and high cholesterol while still in their thirties. Three of her grandparents died of heart attacks or stroke.
When Nguyen was eight, her parents emigrated to the United States under the Humanitarian Operation Program, which offered political asylum to former military officers who had been imprisoned in Vietnam. They settled in New Orleans to live with a relative.
Nguyen's family struggled to make a life in their new land, but their daughter always knew she was college-bound. Determination and a fist full of scholarships, including a Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship, an Initiatives for Minority Students Development Research Scholarship, and a Louisiana Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Research Fellowship, enabled her to attend Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There she joined an undergraduate research project in HHMI professor Isiah Warner's lab, characterizing proteins associated with heart plaques. HHMI professors are active research scientists who are also committed to undergraduate education. "I discovered that I loved working in the lab," she says. "I was hooked."
The following year, Nguyen competed for a spot in HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers summer research experiences for disadvantaged and minority undergraduates in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. She spent her EXROP summer in the lab of HHMI investigator Tom Rapoport, a cell biologist at Harvard Medical School. There, she isolated and studied components of the bacterial protein translocation system. Nguyen not only accomplished the tasks he gave her, Rapoport said, she also suggested promising new experiments.
Nguyen's dream is to one day establish a foundation to improve medical care and provide medical equipment in Vietnam. This fall, she will enroll in the molecular and cellular pathobiology program in biomedical sciences at Wake Forest University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Bowman Gray Campus. She plans to earn an M.D. later.
When Hurricane Katrina hit and wiped out her family's home just as she was in the middle of applying for the Gilliam fellowship, Nguyen again had to call on resilience she learned as a child in Vietnam. "If anything, Katrina has made me much stronger and more determined to overcome any obstacles in my way," says Nguyen, 22. "I intend to be a pioneering physician-scientist. I am on my way."
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