Fatima Karzai: Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. I am a medical oncologist at the NCI, and I am the deputy clinical director at the CCR, the Center for Cancer Research at the NCI.
Andrea Miyahira: So, tell us about your career path and how you got to where you are today.
Fatima Karzai: My career path has been very interesting, I've always been somebody who's very interested in patient care, so my career has been focused on patients, but really it's also been about clinical research and how to bring new and exciting options and treatments to patients. So, I started my training in internal medicine, became a medical oncologist, and was trained at the NCI and NHLBI, and have actually built a career on clinical research with a translational component. And so, it's been a very gratifying career to go and see the bench to bedside and how that can really help patients.
Andrea Miyahira: Thank you. And what are some of the key inspirations that led you to this path?
Fatima Karzai: Really, for me, it is the patients. I think trying to get to new and exciting treatments, especially when somebody is in a more advanced stage of disease, not just in the beginning, where I do focus on prevention and neoadjuvant strategies, but also for those that we can try to make a difference in their overall survival, and with new combinations, new medical breakthroughs in imaging, genetics, now AI is coming on the forefront. So, those are all things that really inspire me.
Andrea Miyahira: So, you were a 2017 PCF young investigator and you do a lot of also clinical research. So, tell us about some of the achievements that you're most excited and proud of.
Fatima Karzai: Well, first I'd like to thank PCF for my 2017 YI. It was a great stepping stone in my career as a clinical researcher and as a medical oncologist. So, the relationship I've had with PCF and with yourself and other people in the organization has been incredibly gratifying. But in terms of what I'm doing next, I'm really going to be focusing on immunotherapy in prostate cancer, and although we've had a lot of unfortunately near misses with immunotherapy in prostate cancer, I think there's still other strategies that we can utilize to try to harness the immune system in fighting prostate cancer.
Andrea Miyahira: So, is there any advice that you wish you had earlier in your career path that you'd like to pass on to the next generation?
Fatima Karzai: Yes. And particularly for women in medicine and STEM and science. I think in the beginning you feel as though you're not allowed a room at the table, and I think it's very important to realize that your voice is important and it matters in any stage of your career, and that you do belong. You shouldn't wait to be invited to the table, I think it's very important for you to reach out and try to carve your niche and what you want to do early on.
Andrea Miyahira: Thank you. And talk about leadership and the importance of leadership, what you think makes a good leader.
Fatima Karzai: So, as my leadership career has evolved too, along with my clinical research career, it's been very eye-opening. Leadership involves a lot of difficult options and difficult strategies to try to implement in day-to-day work across all institutions, but you need to have integrity, transparency, I think you have to have a collaborative effort with everybody you work with. It's very important to make those difficult decisions, but with people and with opinions and with a lot of support from those around you.
Andrea Miyahira: Thank you. And we know mentoring is so important, so I guess what do you think makes a good mentor and a good mentee? And have you had any mentors along the way that you'd like to highlight?
Fatima Karzai: Yeah, sure. So, I think one of the things that we do a lot is when we are searching for mentors, we tend to search for them in a very confined space. And what I would ask people to do is look for mentors outside of their field, outside of their institutions, and really look for people who are not only going to be allies, but also be people who stand up for you in rooms that you can't be in and try to bring you those opportunities. For me, I've had a lot of people at the NCI really try to help me with my career as we move forward, and as I mentioned, PCF was a part of that. So, I think I've had good mentors along the way.
Andrea Miyahira: That's wonderful. And talk about collaboration, how do you view that in terms of its importance in developing careers for women especially?
Fatima Karzai: Yeah. Collaborations are key. I think for me, in one sense, looking at it scientifically, the translational to clinical has been key for me to try to get those ideas from our translational science colleagues to the clinic, but I think collaborations between people that are at other institutions, maybe in other fields of science have been really important because it opens your mind to new ideas and new ways of thinking about things. So, I think whenever there's an opportunity to collaborate with somebody, you should really look into it and try to foster new relationships.
Andrea Miyahira: Yeah. We know the pipeline of women in science and medicine, it's tough to maintain. So, do you have any tips or any other ideas for how can we enhance and maintain this pipeline?
Fatima Karzai: So, there's what we call that leaky pipeline where we see for women at every stage of their careers, we tend to lose very fine candidates, very fine physicians, very fine scientists. And it's not for a lot of those reasons that we think that are life milestones or things like that, we tend to lose good people just because they don't have the support that they need. And I think as we go through whatever training we are involved in, for myself, medical school, residency, fellowship, it's going to be important for those new people coming through these pipelines to realize that they have to have more strength in their surroundings through support, and that comes through policy change. So, I think that's one of the things we need to be doing. But we also need to be highlighting that women and other maybe groups that are not as highlighted in leadership, that we need to find these people early on and really foster their careers.
Andrea Miyahira: Yeah, I agree completely. And then, what keeps you motivated?
Fatima Karzai: For me, it really is the patients. It's trying to get my patients some kind of improvement in their lives, no matter what that might look like to them.
Andrea Miyahira: Thank you. And then, do you have any other parting tips or things that you wanted to share?
Fatima Karzai: I would say, as you go through your career, this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. You're going to have failures and it's okay. And from those failures we learn and we move on, and they don't define your career or your success. So, I would say whatever's going on, keep going.
Andrea Miyahira: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Karzai, for everything that you do for science and for patients, and for taking this time to be here with us today.
Fatima Karzai: Well, thank you so much for having me.