Becoming Involved Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Patricia Molina recounts her journey to becoming a researcher.

I started out in medical school. So my goal was to become a pediatrician, to be a clinician. Research was nowhere in my perspective. It was not something that I had even considered.

I married a classmate before finishing medical school. And we had our first child immediately after finishing the coursework in medical school. So that was perhaps my first crossroads where I felt that I had not planned well enough for how I was going to handle being married to somebody who had a very similar schedule than the one I had been keeping, having a child, and then being able to pursue the specialty that I had wanted. So at that point, that sent me through a lot of rethinking and reevaluating what I wanted to do with my life.

So I started working in the research unit in my university. At the beginning, ironically, two hours a day. Slowly that two hours grew into six hours a day. And slowly that grew into the realization that I had been trained to be a physician. I had not been trained to be a researcher. And the set of skills that are needed to pursue research are completely different than the set of skills needed to be a clinician.

And that is what made me look into pursuing a PhD in a basic science, which is really what was closest to what my interests had been. That brought me to come to the U.S. to pursue my PhD in physiology. I initially started at the University of South Alabama. And because we were a dual career couple, we had to basically make adjustments. And so when my husband started his residency at Tulane, we moved to LSU, where I completed my PhD in physiology.

The subsequent move was also family-related because I followed my husband. He went to do his fellowship at Vanderbilt. And so that's where I was able to identify a post-doctoral fellowship. The subsequent move was driven by me. I developed a very good working relationship with my mentor at that time, and he was becoming the chairman of surgery. He needed somebody to help him settle his lab and run his lab. And, so, it was a very good opportunity for me to make that step into the academic ladder.

We were in New York, SUNY Stony Brook, for approximately six years. And, then after that decided to migrate back to the south, coming back to New Orleans, which had been my home institution at LSU Health Sciences Center. I came back as an Associate Professor, started building my research.

At the beginning, my goal was just to reestablish my laboratory, to prove my independence from my mentor. I had been attached to him almost ten years by now. And, so, that was an issue, and it's an issue that I recognize even more and more now in more junior faculty members. That step of leaving the person that has protected you, leaving the person that has given you the means to be able to do the things that you want to do, and trying to make it on your own.

It's almost like when you leave home and try to support yourself. So it's the same concept, and it's something that you really do not, you don't know that it's going on until you make the separation. Until you've cut that umbilical cord, you don't realize how sheltered and how protected your academic and professional life had been.