MIRIAM ROSIN and the big picture

My name is Miriam Rosin and I am a professer at BPK here at SFU and I work with Cancer. I teach it, I research it and I live it. What happened to me early in my career is that I realized I didn't want to be just lab based, I wanted to be part of the big picture so I spent the greater portion of the early part of my career traveling to third world countries. I met a lot of people and I saw a lot of disease. I saw a lot of pain and a lot of heartache and I looked at people who shared a vision for change and we worked together to actually make a difference. This is something I've learned, the importance of focus towards and end. In my case it was making a difference to cancer. The ability to come together with people from diverse backgrounds, expertise, skill sets, different lifetime experiences and focus on issues that affect patient management and come up with new strategies is a privilege. It's an opportunity and a challenge. It's something that is extremely rewarding if you can look back at two or three decades of research and education and careers and say, over time, that there was thread, something changed.