NCI’s first woman senior clinician says finding focus yields broad opportunities
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Jennifer A. Kanakry, MD, was recently appointed as senior clinician at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, the first woman to hold the position.
Healio spoke with Kanakry, who also serves as the NIH hematology/oncology fellowship program director, about her personal journey through medicine that led to achieving this level of success.
Healio: What led you to specialize in your field?
Kanakry: My pathway to medicine occurred a little by chance. I grew up in a family who mostly had not gone to undergraduate college, much less held any positions in the medical field. When I went to college considering neuroscience, a friend told me I should be a pediatric oncologist, which felt out of the blue but made me start to think of medicine, specifically child psychiatry, as a career. I then had a continuity clinic in medical school with a hematologist and found it amazing to be able to meet patients and then go to the microscope and make a diagnosis in 1 day just by looking at the labs, the blood or marrow. It changed my mind about my initial thoughts of pursuing psychiatry. Through residency, I decided to focus on hematologic malignancies, specifically lymphomas.
Healio: What does it mean to you to be the first woman senior clinician at the NCI’s Center for Cancer Research?
Kanakry: If someone had asked me where I would be today 5 or 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined this, and it makes me proud of myself and of the institute for helping me get to this position.
Healio: Have you had any specific mentors that helped you along your path?
Kanakry: I had many mentors from research to clinic and career in general. Each of those mentors provided different advice, but it was the hematology program director at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Robert Brodsky, MD, who really helped me define my track and find a way into hematology. He told me that fellowship was like a funnel: You become very good at one thing, and your focus and expertise will broaden out later. When you go into fellowship you are still in the mindset of doing it all and you may worry about losing out on opportunities if you don’t do everything, but as you become really good at one thing, he taught me that the opportunities will come.
In fellowship, I focused on virus-associated malignancies and bone marrow transplants for those diseases and now I’m the program director for the NIH hematology/oncology program. I perform bone marrow transplant for patients with hematologic malignancies, and I took my focus on acquired immune deficiencies and applied that to inborn errors of immunity. So, it does all broaden back out. We can’t necessarily see that as a trainee, and you worry about narrowing down. That was probably one of the best pieces of advice I got along the way.
Healio: Do you have any specific projects you’re excited to continue or to start?
Kanakry: I’m excited about new ways to make bone marrow transplants safer, less toxic and more effective for patients who have immunologic and hematologic diseases that can be cured through transplant, so I always have a new project in that area on the clinical research side.
Also, becoming program director for the fellowship program has been a huge learning curve for me, but I find it exciting and fun. I like to be creative and look for new ways to change and improve things. Becoming program director has allowed me to do that in a different way than clinical research. It has been exciting to look at some of the problems in the fellowship and look for ways to improve the training experience, build on existing strengths and also make it more of a diverse and inclusive program.
Healio: Do you have any other advice for women early in their medical career?
Kanakry: It’s important to know what you value, to know what matters to you and others within your team, and to hold on to those values. It’s also important to direct your energy and inner narrative, and try to rethink how you’re going to approach your career, your personal life, your work life — that work-life balance — and be creative about it. I personally didn’t always believe in myself, I didn’t believe in my pathway to medicine or to the pathway I have now, but a lot of that stemmed from how I was raised and believing that there were certain roles for women and certain roles in medicine. We need to be willing to rethink that and to help others rethink that, to learn to handle the ups and downs as you go and to ultimately take chances and keep pushing on.
For more information:
Jennifer A. Kanakry, MD, can be reached at jennifer.kanakry@nih.gov.
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