Growing up in a small town in northern Mexico, Frida Teran watched how her father—a doctor of internal medicine—interacted with his patients. The care he provided and the empathy he showed sparked within her a curiosity for medicine.
“Ever since I was little, I clearly remember him coming home from the hospital or just seeing patients, and I was always very curious about my dad taking care of other people,” she says. “I knew my dad as my dad—but when I saw him be someone's doctor, it was like I was seeing an entirely different person. The patient-doctor relationship is something that I consider so sacred, and my first exposure to it was with my dad. So, when I saw that, I thought, ‘I want to be someone like that.’”
Teran went on to complete her undergraduate degree in San Antonio before coming to Iowa in 2014 for the UI Carver College of Medicine Medical Scientist Training Program, which offers MD and PhD degrees in a combined curriculum. Teran had realized her affinity for research in addition to clinical medicine after participating in the college’s Summer Undergraduate MSTP Research Program in 2012.