Dorothy Sipkins, MD, PhD, became fascinated by leukemia during her medical training. She remembers studying a biopsy from an elderly patient who had just had chemotherapy and was in remission. “You couldn’t see any leukemic cells; the bone marrow looked clean,” Sipkins remembers. But she knew that because of the patient’s age, her cancer was highly likely to return. Before long, her bone marrow would likely be full of cancer cells. Where were these cells hiding?

Brant Inman, MD, MS, is skilled at the major surgeries that no one wants to be unlucky enough to have. “I’m the guy who when you’ve got a tumor this big, you call to take it out,” says Inman, holding his hands up in the shape of a grapefruit. “Yesterday I removed two bladders and replaced them.”

Two weeks before her 19th birthday, Samantha Casper, MSN’18, had a car accident. She was headed out for a night of fun with a friend, but ended up at the hospital. The doctors told her mother that Casper had suffered a traumatic brain injury and that she might not survive. Casper has survived, but she was told that due to short term memory loss, she could never go back to college. But she had other plans. “My mother instilled in me ‘Do more, be more, don't give up,’” says Casper.

The 2012 London Olympic Games played out like a fairy tale for Abby Johnston McGrath, MD’18. She stood on the podium, watching her country's flag rise up as they put a silver medal for synchronized diving around her neck, and she was inspired to continue diving at the 2016 Olympics.