Dr. Jessica Shui, a Bucknell alumna, has a fascinating journey into medicine, where she splits her time between being a clinician, professor, and scientist. She had graduated from Bucknell with a major in Biology, minor in Philosophy and Chinese, all while leading the Latino Dance Corner and Chinese Cultural Association. Dr. Shui shares advice with students and discusses how her experiences at Bucknell have shaped her current life as a Neonatologist-Scientist at Mass General Brigham for Children and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
Jessica is fondly nostalgic about her years at Bucknell. Her advice to pre-med students is to balance classes and extracurriculars that fit in your comfort zone with trying completely new experiences to discover a new passion or, at the least, be introduced to a new point of view. Your undergraduate years are a unique opportunity for growth and you may not have the luxury of time to experiment, once you start the path to being a physician.
She credits multiple aspects of Bucknell to prepare her for medical school. The curriculum to provide a strong foundation, paired with support from professors in a smaller class setting, prepared her for the MCATs. She valued Bucknell’s network of alumni and Bucknell parents to give her multiple externships for clinical exposure and the connections to start her networking. Her introduction to basic science research in Dr. Stowe’s laboratory was career defining. The benefit of Bucknell not having a large graduate program meant as an undergraduate student she was given responsibilities and ownership of her research project and had direct mentorship. This led to her first first-author manuscript. These early successes, in a safe learning environment, encouraged her down a path of academic medicine. Her extracurricular activities allowed her to develop her leadership skills and style that are applicable as an attending physician of a multidisciplinary team, such as being the president of the Chinese Cultural Association and the president of Latino Dance Corner. Furthermore, Bucknell provided a community, and she leaned on her pre-med peers to help navigate the medical school application and interview process.
After graduating from Bucknell in 2009, she matriculated into New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY, from 2009-2013. She then matched into the pediatric residency at University of Connecticut, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, CT from 2013-2016. From 2016-2019 she completed her Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine fellowship at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she also served as Chief Fellow. She was recruited as a neonatologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and joined the faculty of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School in 2019. As a scientist, she began her career as a translational scientist studying differentiation of lung progenitor cells from premature babies. In 2023 she developed a new research niche to study complex infant cardiopulmonary physiology with technology called electrical impedance tomography.
As a Neonatologist-Scientist at Mass General Brigham for Children, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, she enjoys the trifecta of academic medicine: clinically taking care of critically ill infants, teaching the next generation of pediatricians and neonatologists, and on a research standpoint, developing novel approaches to help future patients.
