Meet Victoria Parikh, a clinician scientist in cardiovascular medicine at Stanford Medicine and a HumBio alumna from the class of 2005. Parikh started her journey as a curious HumBio student and is now a respected scientist and dedicated Core faculty member. In many ways, her journey encapsulates HumBio’s spirit of exploration, discovery, and integration.
Growing up, Parikh admired her father’s research work as an aero-astro engineer and her mother’s compassionate care for her patients as a hospital microbiology lab technician. Upon arrival at Stanford, she was quickly drawn in by HumBio’s promise to merge her interests in biology, human health, medicine, and society and signed up for the Core. Realizing she could learn about disease and also study the disparities and gaps in available services for treating those diseases, Parikh’s interest in studying Human Biology was solidified and she officially declared HumBio.
“No matter how many times I stepped away from research, it just kept drawing me back,” Parikh laughed. Despite her early reluctance to engage in research, Parikh appreciated that research not only allows you to ask questions that no one yet knows the answer to, but also provides you with the means to answer them. Under Dr. Russ Fernald’s guidance, she began investigating ties between hormones and diseases such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome. In taking Dr. Paul Fisher’s Cancer Epidemiology upper-division course, Parikh found herself increasingly interested in clinical research, how statistics about health play out in a real-world setting, and the value of being able to ask the right questions at the fundamental level.
Her research experiences in HumBio propelled her into medical school and eventually a research-centric career path. After medical school, Parikh dove head-first into research in both lab and clinical settings using the skills she first developed in HumBio. Her exploration of metabolic disease and social stress in understanding human health and disease led her to physiology and then cardiovascular medicine.
Today, Parikh is a clinician scientist specializing in genetic cardiovascular disease and the director of the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease (SCICD). Recently, Parikh also returned to HumBio as a professor in HumBio’s 4A Core course, The Human Organism, where she lectures on human physiology. Encouraged by one of her long-time HumBio mentors, Paul Fisher, and reflecting on her own experiences in the Core, Parikh was excited to join the faculty team. “If I can inspire even one student the way that I felt inspired in those physiology core lectures, that would be incredible,” she reflected. “In what other setting does a 19-20-year-old have the ability to see and learn about the world from such a broad but also intricately connected perspective? I knew immediately that I wanted to be part of the educational awakening and this excitement of science for the students like the Core faculty was for me.”
Parikh has enjoyed being a part of the cross-disciplinary, collaborative teaching team and discovering how the team works together behind the scenes to build a framework that allows students to learn key concepts and tie them all together across the Core sequence. “Some of the folks who are teaching now also taught when I was in the Core and it has been so incredible to see how they think, how they constantly test the principles and materials they use, and recognize that they are still scientists who are always searching for more answers and want to do it the right way,” Parikh shared. She also admires the Core faculty’s ability to adapt the curriculum to a changing scientific landscape such as their use of the COVID-19 pandemic to teach students about the healthcare system and the social forces that determine health.
A perennial challenge in the Core is ensuring that while the content stands alone, the classes also tie back into a larger framework of understanding. Like her colleagues, Parikh builds her lectures to connect with the key skills or concepts and processes that students are learning such as using cardiovascular medicine trials to exemplify the basics of trial design and statistical analysis. She draws parallels between processes in different parts of the body to showcase how they work together, even if they serve different functions. Recognizing that everything she learned as a student in the Core was in the context of human beings and human disease, Parikh tries to anchor her lectures in this same human-centric schema and build her lectures around the big concepts the faculty want students to take away. Her teaching style also prioritizes engagement by asking questions and tossing out candy or getting the students out of their chairs to act out movements such as cardiac arrhythmias.
Parikh’s journey through HumBio as a student left her with critical insights that continue to shape her approach as a clinician scientist, teacher, and mentor to the next generation of HumBio Core students. One such insight is that no event occurs in isolation. “Every decision we make as humans, whether it’s in our careers, in our family life, in the laboratory, or the clinic when we’re changing a medication, every decision that we make is in the context of a complex system. And some of it we understand, and some of it we don’t,” she explained.
A second takeaway Parikh points to is the need to accommodate uncertainty in our attempts to understand these complex systems because other "external pressures" are always operating on those systems. When things don’t go as anticipated, we shouldn’t view this as doing something wrong or making a mistake but rather reframe our mindsets to say “there’s something about the system that I don’t understand but that I want to explore.” This mindset has fueled her continuous pursuit of knowledge and improvement, contributing to her success as a researcher and educator.
One of the remarkable aspects of the HumBio experience, something that Parikh has found value in, is the enduring sense of community that extends far beyond the confines of the academic setting. “The magic of HumBio is that family lasts,” she said, pointing to the lasting mentorships and connections formed among students, faculty, and alumni. Reflecting on these experiences, Parikh encourages current Core students to take advantage of the incredible opportunity to learn from, talk with, and be mentored by the world-renowned scientists and doctors who make up the Core faculty. Amidst the pressures of academic achievement and career aspirations, she also encourages students to savor the educational journey by going beyond simply absorbing the information by paying attention to what excites you. “Show up to the lectures and soak it in. Notice what makes you feel happy and excited, and take notice of what you like studying the most,” she shared. “Let that feeling of excitement and intellectual stimulation be your guide.”