Ivy Shing Chen, a '97 graduate in biology, works in her lab in the Veterinary Research Tower. She is going on to a graduate program in dentistry in the fall. Adriana Rovers/University Photography
By Roger Segelken
Ivy Shing Chen knew she wanted to serve humanity when she signed up for all the biology classes that would lead to medical school. She even picked a medicine-related topic for her undergraduate research -- fetal development and the physiological initiation of labor.
But something changed in American medicine during the four years the student who wanted to be a physician spent at Cornell. The era of managed care, Chen now believes, has taken medical decision-making away from the doctors, so that life-and-death decisions are too often made with more concern for the fiscal well-being of insurance companies than the physical health of the patients.
"I want to be accountable to patients, not to a business corporation," Chen said.
Nothing personal, of course, against businessmen. Her father is one, and her mother is an accountant. Born in St. Louis, she moved with her family to Hong Kong and went to school for 12 years there. A Cornell alumna in Hong Kong encouraged Chen to attend the university, as did an older high school friend who already was enrolled here.
"He said the weather is awful and you have to study hard," Chen recalled. She chose Cornell anyway and survived the upstate New York winters. The academic pressure was tolerable, too, said Chen, who is graduating with a 4.0 average.
The most important thing she learned from her undergraduate research, Chen said, is how to work independently, as an individual, while being part of a team. She joined one of the larger biological science teams at Cornell, the Laboratory for Pregnancy and Newborn Research, first spending a summer there as a Hughes Foundation scholar.
"We were looking at the role of the fetal adrenal gland in initiating the birth process," Chen said, explaining the endocrine signaling pathways in sheep, which are one of the animal models for human pregnancy at the Cornell lab.
What researchers here are learning about the "time to be born" signals may someday reduce the incidence of infants born before their time. "I learned the importance of teamwork -- you can't claim an experiment as your own because everybody's working together -- but you also have to be proactive and make yourself heard or you will disappear into the background," she said.
Preliminary findings by Chen's research team, led by the James Law Professor of Reproductive Physiology Peter W. Nathanielsz, were presented in March at the San Diego meeting of the Society for Gynecological Investigation. But publication in the medical literature of articles, which will bear Chen's name as one of the co-authors, must await further data-gathering. That's a job for student-researchers who follow her, the independent team player said.
Besides biology, Chen branched out from the College of Arts and Sciences and took elective courses in almost every other college: entrepreneurship in the business school, cooking in the hotel school, speech in the ag college, sculpture in the architecture school, infant development in human ecology, languages, literature and physical education classes in sports she never knew she'd like.
"That's what I would tell an incoming student," she said. "Cornell has something for everyone, and you never know what you'll like unless you try."
Chen liked medical research but not enough to change her career direction. She would rather work directly with humans. That's why she's going into dentistry, starting at Columbia University this fall.
"In dentistry, you have more opportunity to practice preventive medicine," Chen said. "You can build long-term relationships with patients."
That's important to someone who wants to work for people, not profits, for a long time.