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Edwin H. Rodriguez
Edwin Rodriguez, a Hispanic American of Salvadoran descent, traces his interest in biomedical science to the winter of 1997, when he spent 14 sleepless nights by the hospital bed of his unconscious mother, as her kidneys failed.
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Edwin H. Rodriguez
Stanford University
Stanford, California
Photo: Barbara Ries
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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A kidney donation and good medical care gave Rodriguez's mother back her health. But Rodriguez, now 21, continues to battle the helplessness that patients of serious disease too often experience. Despite what he describes as a substandard early education and a need to work part-time during high school to help support his family, Rodriguez earned a Dallas YMCA scholarship and a Hispanic Heritage Youth Award that enabled him to attend Stanford University. There, as an undergraduate biology major, he has worked as a Spanish interpreter and patient advocate at one of the school's free clinics.
He also won admission to HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offered him a summer research experience with HHMI investigator Patrick Brown, a Stanford University biochemist who specializes in using DNA microarrays to take molecular snapshots of cells experiencing diverse conditions, including disease. In Brown's lab, Rodriguez studied the effects of hypoxia, or low oxygen, on kidney cells. That work led to a recent publication in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine.
Building on his EXROP project, Rodriguez has continued to work independently in Brown's lab, evaluating hypoxia's link to kidney cancer. He hopes to understand hypoxia's effects across the genome.
"My dream is to end up like Pat Brown, running my own lab at a research institution like Stanford," said Rodriguez. "I want a life in academic medicine, treating patients and leading my own lab to new understandings of disease." He is currently applying to M.D.-Ph.D. programs for the fall of 2006.
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