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| STUDENT BIOGRAPHY |
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| Ahmed Gilani |
| Graduate Student |
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| I have been trained as a physician but my real interest has always been in science. I completed my medicine from Aga Khan University, Pakistan. While most areas in medicine and biology interest me; I find the brain to be the most fascinating. I would like to learn neuroscience using mental disease as a model. Part of my fascination for this comes from the patients I have seen on the ward.
During medical school I spent several summers in various labs at Harvard and Mount Sinai, NY. During one summer, I conducted a project on the role of islet transplantation on pancreatic regeneration in mice. During another, I tried to clone BAC constructs that were to be used later on for metabolism research.
Back home, I would spend my time, examining patients and also did some research on public health and public policy including planning and analyzing large scale statistical surveys regarding diarrhea and polio in Pakistan. Since graduation, in 2004, I have spent my time taking US Medical License Exams, teaching anatomy to medical students and doing consultancy on bioinformatics business.
While I look for a career that combines research, medicine and entrepreneurship; I want to understand the debates in other fields of human knowledge and ponder over some of the big questions of life. In my spare time, I like to read about philosophy, literature, cultures and religion. As yet I have explored some Urdu and Persian poetry, Sufi thought and Islamic architecture. I grew up in Islamabad, which was a sleepy small town till a few years back; and enjoy swimming, sketching and hiking.
During graduate school I want to concentrate on learning molecular and cell biology tools, which I can apply on an interesting problem relating to human disease. As for my long-term goals, I want to generate knowledge for tomorrow’s physician. I envision a medicine that goes beyond mere ‘pattern recognition’; where ‘idiopathic’ disappears from the textbook and the distinction between the physician and the scientist is lost.
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