| 
 Irked
about inadequacies of the umbrella, that it’s impotent when
it comes to keeping you dry but potent as a weapon against others?
Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D. is, and vows one day to tackle it. But
first she’s got other fish to fry.
Like measuring kidney function with magnetic resonance imaging
to give patients afflicted with kidney disease a fighting chance.
Dr. Lee has two National Institute of Health grants in this area.
She is using these “fancy tools” to assess how well
the kidney makes urine in ways not done before. Biopsies were standard
practice but ineffective. One out of three people who have had
a kidney transplant have an episode where their kidneys stop working.
MRI can indicate why these transplants fail.
Four years ago, Dr. Lee, 39, became vice chair for research
in the department of radiology at New York University Medical Center
in New York. Her department consists of 90 clinical faculty and
20 research faculty plus overlapping teams from other departments.
Lee got into her specialty somewhat serendipitously. In her last
year of radiology training, she observed that you could see in
clinical studies the differences in patients with normal and abnormal
kidney function, but that there were no ways to accurately measure
this. Refining such a system would give diabetics and others with
kidney ailments a more sensitive and accurate measurement, and
a treatment that’s a lot less painful than having a needle
stuck in their kidneys.
Board certified in diagnostic radiology, Dr. Lee spends one day
each week studying magnetic resonance images of everything from
below the neck to the pelvis. That includes the heart, pancreas,
kidneys, pelvic organs, ovaries and prostate. The 20 or 30 patients
she sees on her clinic days each can present over 1,000 images.
Some are there because they have tested positive for hepatitis.
Others have cancer and these MRI images reveal how they’re
responding to therapy. With heart patients she can tell surgeons
how much viable cardiac tissue is left, so they can determine whether
to perform a bypass operation.
Doing her own research in and of itself would be a full time job,
but Lee also supervises junior faculty. She formally mentors eleven
and hosts of others informally.
So many things she loves about her work life: the researchers,
scientists, and clinicians with their good questions about how
to make patients better, bringing together the teams that are needed
to get the work done; empowering people to do good, the intensely
satisfying feeling of knowing you’ve made a difference.
Five years ago her depart-ment included five PhDs; now there are
more than twenty. And the research center in magnetic resonance
imaging is state of the art and highly recognized. Nowhere on the
NIH rankings in 1998 when she joined the faculty, it is now within
the top fifteen based on grants awarded, and most recently was
listed number nine.
Those grants, according to Lee, are increasingly difficult to
secure. “The war in Iraq has siphoned money from medical
research. Three years ago, scientists had a 20 percent shot; today,
that’s down to 10 percent.” That means that Lee and
her colleagues are spending a disproportionate amount of time writing
grant applications.
The mother of three girls, four, two and eight months old, Lee
is married to a professor of law from New Zealand. She met him
at Oxford University, where she’d gone as a Rhodes Scholar
after public high school and a three-year bachelor’s degree
from Harvard to get a PhD in medical engineering in 1989. Three
years later, Lee earned her medical degree with honors at Harvard
Medical School. Then it was down to Durham, North Carolina for
a residency in diagnostic radiology at Duke University. In 1997,
she moved to New York to do a fellowship in body MRI and thoracic
imaging at New York University and joined the staff a year later.
Lee was born in New Jersey but grew up mostly in Oklahoma. Her
parents, Chinese immigrants, are professors at the University of
Oklahoma. Her mother who recently retired as Dean of the School
of Public Health now runs several large epidemiologic studies on
heart disease and diabetes in Native Americans in Oklahoma. Her
father continues as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and has
several inventions in biomedical applications. Each has written
several textbooks. Her sister, six years her junior, is an endocrinologist
and genetic epidemiologist.
Although Lee considers her scientific advances significant achievements,
she considers balancing family life and work life an even greater
accomplishment. “I’ve been able to work it out where
I’m a valuable contributor to both and have done well separating
family life from work life.” She does, however, work on weekends,
and did we mention she is in the final throes of completing an
MBA (more about THAT later.)
Her best experience, however, was in Oxford, with excursions to
Moscow, Burma, Beijing, and East Berlin among other places. Not
just because she met her husband there, but because she acquired
a wide circle of close friends and explored a broad range of interests
such as a study of comparative religion and philosophy. In college,
she was no drone either. She coxed crew, was a DJ at the radio
station, and was heavily invested in volunteer work and highly
active in her dorm and student council.
Now Lee is focused on growing the department by securing grants,
developing programs, recruiting people and collaborating with NYU’s
main campus. She hopes to expand the 60 person research staff to
100 by 2008, and the funding from $9 million to at least $12 million
by then.
She also expects to have completed her MBA program and mastered
many of the skills that medical and research training leave out
that are necessary for management/leadership positions, such as
finance and strategy, managing people and investing resources.
This kind of knowledge has helped her both to sort out personnel
issues and to devise research strategies, challenges she admits
keep her up at night.
These nights, it’s most likely her young brood keeping her
up. But when they’re grown, Totes watch out! That umbrella
scenario still hovers.
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