Mary Feng: Thanks so much for inviting me today.
Andrea Miyahira: So first, tell us all of your titles at UCSF, and I would love to hear your career journey and how you got to where you are today.
Mary Feng: Sure. I'm a Professor of Radiation Oncology at UCSF. I also am the Vice Chair of Clinical Research for the department. So that means that I enable everybody's clinical research, clinical trials. And I'm also the medical director of the cancer center, so I have to think of what the title is. Medical Director of the Clinical Research Network Office, which means that I enable clinical trials at all of our regional partner hospitals across the Bay.
Andrea Miyahira: Tell us about your research. I'm really excited to hear the things you've been working on.
Mary Feng: My research is, I guess, twofold. One is that I consider the research that I do mostly in GI oncology, combining radiation and new technologies, combining radiation and immunotherapy to really try to, in a multimodal way, advance patient care. One of my favorite clinical trials that I'm working on right now is using radiation to treat painful tumors that patients have when they have hepatocellular carcinoma and adding that with immunotherapy to get the two goals achieved of making patients feel immediately better, but also trying to enhance immune system and make the immunotherapy work better. So a two-hit sort of strategy. I also consider the research that I enable for other people, in a way, my research, too, because I love to see it flourish. And one of the exciting projects that I've been working on in the past couple years is partnering with our regional hospitals where doctors and staff have literally never run a clinical trial before or enrolled a patient in some cases and teaching them how to make an investigational pharmacy, how to enroll patients in clinical trials. And that's really exciting to enable research in other areas, too.
Andrea Miyahira: That's wonderful. And talk about innovation and creativity and what those mean to you and how you've applied them and what you do.
Mary Feng: I think innovation and creativity are things that are the joys of life. Trying to remind ourselves that we're not enclosed in a box and we don't have to just follow the footsteps that everybody laid out before us. What I try to tell my teenage kids is that we should always take a broad view on life, learn a little bit about music, art, et cetera. And as a doctor, we want to learn in fields that are not our own, to borrow ideas that people have been applying to other fields and then bring them here. One example of that in prostate cancer is the Pam (Inaudible) story from breast cancer that is not new news in breast cancer, but really is new news in prostate cancer. So some short-term innovation like that, borrowing. I do that a lot in technology from astrophysics and automotive engineering. We do a lot of borrowing from that for radiation oncology, but also taking a step back and just thinking differently. Why should we plug away at little bits at a problem that we have, but think around it, go around it. I think it's just fun to think differently, not linearly all the time.
Andrea Miyahira: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. So let's talk about teamwork and collaboration and what those mean in research and medicine to you and how you've applied them to advance your career and any accomplishments.
Mary Feng: There's a phrase that people throw around that teamwork makes the dream work. And I think that's absolutely true. In medicine, especially and just all over in any aspect of life, it's really tough going on your own. If we operate in a silo, it's not only lonely, boring, and frustrating, but we don't really get a lot done. So teams are where everything is. So I love this more modern idea of team science, especially through medicine. In my daily clinic, I'm always collaborating with medical oncologists, surgeons, and other doctors because patients, frankly, need a whole team around them to envelop them. So I love that. In terms of my career, the team is everything. UroToday couldn't function without its team, I couldn't function without my team, and it makes it the collaboration and the personal relationships that we develop with people are, I think, a big part of what keeps me going.
Andrea Miyahira: That's wonderful. And I would love to hear your thoughts on leadership. You have so many leadership roles, including recently chairing the GI ASCO meeting last month. So I'd love to hear what you think about what makes a good leader.
Mary Feng: There are so many qualities that we can find in good leaders, and there's such a variety of different leaders, I think, that I would follow. But I think some of the common qualities would be coming into a cause, being a good human being. I hope I'm that, but really we want to follow good human beings. Somebody who takes the time to find out what really motivates people on their team, what they really love, and also what they hate, and helps people do more of what they love and less of what they hate, and really inspires people to the common cause. So I think just being a good human who's a good role model, who has people's best interests in mind.
Andrea Miyahira: Yeah, I think those are some of the absolute best leaders. So I completely agree with that. So what are some of the things that keep you inspired and motivated?
Mary Feng: I've always been an optimistic person in life. After college and before medical school, I took a year off and taught reading just across the Bay in Oakland through AmeriCorps. I always wanted to change the world as a child. I started a recycling program, and the first recycling program in my school. And now one of the causes I'm really committed to is cancer research. I've always been committed to that since I discovered radiation oncology in medical school. But as you know, recently my husband, Felix Feng, died of cancer just over a year ago and that really changes things. I think it was a terrible, terrible experience for me, my family, his friends, but the silver lining, I think, of that is that it just redoubles people's efforts to work towards curing such a terrible disease so that we, everybody, doesn't have to go through that personally or for their family. So I think people motivate me, and certainly Felix will continue to motivate many people.
Andrea Miyahira: Felix meant a lot to so many people. Everyone who knew him loved him and admired him and he is so dearly missed. I'm truly glad to see all of the different initiatives that are being done in his name to maintain his spirit. So do you have any words of wisdom for younger women that want to follow in your footsteps, things that you wish you knew that when you were younger?
Mary Feng: I think one big change that I've made in my life or, in a way, that I've evolved in my life over the years is to not be so independent and going along, go it alone. All this talk about teamwork, I always was part of teams, but as that part of a team, I always felt proud to do things on my own and figure it out. And over the years, Felix actually taught me this; crowdsource, it makes everything not only more fun, but faster. So if you hit a wall or you have some problems, struggle a little bit, and then ask. So I always tell my mentees that a little struggle is great. It teaches you perseverance, but if you're hitting a brick wall, just go around it. So don't go it alone, crowdsource ideas for life, work-life balance, for research ideas, all of this. That's why we're human. That's how we make the progress. Another piece of advice is outsource. So you want to crowdsource and you want to outsource because we can't do everything ourselves. And especially, not that everybody should have a family, but I always wanted to have a family and also balance a career.
And we can't be everything to everybody, so outsource. I learned from Karen Knudsen, who I always wanted to be her when I grew up about au pairs. And there was a five-step program for choosing an au pair that she had and there's rules you had to follow, and as long as you followed them, we actually had lovely international au pairs in our house who helped take care of the children, but also motivated us to celebrate every holiday bigger to show them a great experience. So I thought that it was really great advice from her part. She had to tell me like five times that I needed to get an au pair, and I finally listened and for our family, it worked. It worked really well. So crowdsource and outsource, I guess.
Andrea Miyahira: Well, those are really, really wonderful tips and thank you so much for sharing them and thanks so much for joining me today.
Mary Feng: Thank you so much. I always love talking to you.