When Christine Dingivan took her first job in biotech, she assumed she would stay a couple years and go back to clinical medicine as a practicing surgeon. But when she discovered how much she loved research, that plan changed permanently.
“It all just came together for me, but it was not the career that I set out for when I went to medical school,” Dingivan says. “When you develop a new drug and it becomes available, whether it’s for cancer or an influenza vaccine or a pandemic — like the Covid-19 vaccines — you see the millions of people that have the opportunity to benefit from that work. You can only treat so many patients in one career, and I really felt like I was making a bigger impact in a way.”