Student Spends Summer at Country’s Top Cancer Center.
Carla Irizarry-Delgado poses smiling in front of the Talbot Building. PHOTO: MEGAN JONES
MPH Student Spends Summer at Country’s Top Cancer Center
Carla Irizarry-Delgado conducted epidemiological research on breast cancer prevention at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as a trainee in the center’s summer program for young scientists.
For Carla Irizarry-Delgado, a second-year MPH student studying epidemiology and biostatistics, the path to a summer practicum at the country’s top cancer center began with two lifelong loves: learning and her mother.
An ambitious student from an early age, Irizarry-Delgado balanced her classwork with music, playing percussion in the marching band, bassoon in the wind ensemble, and studying music theory throughout high school. After graduating with high honors, she attended the University of South Florida (USF) where she took classes in math, physics, chemistry, and biology towards a degree in biomedical sciences. At USF, she picked up pickleball, served on the honors college student council, and volunteered as a peer mentor. In 2023, she was poised enter her final year at USF a year early with an enviable résumé and plans for medical or pharmacy school. Then, her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Irizarry-Delgado was caught entirely off guard. Her mother, Marycelys, used to work in the healthcare field as a dietician. Marycelys is a nonsmoker, eats healthy, exercises daily, and did not have any of the other common risks factors—yet at age 49, she was facing breast cancer.
Fortunately, the prognosis for Marycelys’s cancer (HR-/HER2+ invasive ductal carcinoma) was good. While it may have been a death sentence as recently as the late 1990s, the discovery of the role of the HER2 protein in promoting cancer cell growth enabled researchers to develop the drug trastuzumab to target the protein. With proper treatment, Marycelys’s doctors believed she could achieve complete remission. She insisted her daughter stay at USF and continue her studies.
As her mother began chemotherapy back home in southern Florida, four hours north in Tampa, Irizarry-Delgado began a maternal and child health scholars’ program at the recommendation of one of her favorite humanities professors. With a proper introduction, the professor suspected Irizarry-Delgado might discover a talent and passion for public health, and she did.
“I learned about the social determinants of health—these social aspects to health that I never had thought about but made much sense to me—and I immediately fell in love,” says Irizarry-Delgado, who went on to declare a minor in public health at USF. She realized she could apply her love of learning to answer for herself the questions swirling in her head since her mother’s diagnosis: Why does cancer happen and how can it be prevented?
Irizarry-Delgado changed course, setting her sights on a career as a cancer epidemiologist. Her first step, she decided, would be to get an MPH at the School of Public Health.
Upon moving to Boston, Irizarry-Delgado did not miss a beat, immediately immersing herself in campus life at SPH. Her first semester, she enrolled in a career prep course, became a student ambassador, took a part-time job as a student content creator in the Office of Marketing and Communications, authored a viewpoint on harmful rhetoric about Puerto Rico (her homeland) for the School’s newsletter, and founded a new student organization (BU’s Latino Caucus for Public Health). Later, in a reel for SPH’s Instagram sharing advice with her peers, Irizarry-Delgado would point to her early involvement and networking efforts as key to landing her practicum at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center last summer.
For ten weeks, Irizarry-Delgado lived and worked in Houston alongside a cohort of other students in MD Anderson’s Cancer Advanced Training and Learning for Young Scientists (CATALYST) program. In addition to an hourly wage, the program provided round-trip airfare and accommodations in a hotel near the hospital’s campus, she says. “It felt like summer camp sometimes. You’re working during the day, and then in the evenings, you’re at the pool, playing board games, or just hanging out together.”
As a participant in the Cancer Prevention Research Training Program under the umbrella of CATALYST, Irizarry-Delgado received mentorship from Mariana Chavez Mac Gregor, the chair ad interim of the Department of Health Services Research and a medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer. With the support of the doctor and seasoned researcher, Irizarry-Delgado spent her days investigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on diagnosis and treatment of an early form of breast cancer (ductal carcinoma in situ).
Irizarry-Delgado joined a team of researchers using data from the National Cancer Database to explore patterns in patient cases of the cancer between 2019 and 2022 across a variety of characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, income, educational attainment, and insurance status.
“We hypothesized that the overall number of cases decreased dramatically in 2020,” says Irizarry-Delgado. Which would make sense, she says, because many healthcare systems suspended preventative services like cancer screenings at the time, as COVID strained providers’ time and resources.
Reflecting on the summer, Irizarry-Delgado is grateful for the opportunity her practicum at MD Anderson gave her to contribute to advancing cancer prevention. She understands the importance of improving access to preventative screenings on a personal level: her mother’s cancer was indetectable on routine mammogram and only caught thanks to a supplemental breast ultrasound. Early detection likely saved her mother’s life.
After completing her MPH, Irizarry-Delgado intends to pursue a PhD in cancer epidemiology.
“[CATALYST] is such a good thing to have on your résumé, but more than that, it was a great learning experience. I worked with an actual team of researchers, contributed to something meaningful, and I’m even writing a manuscript for the project,” she says. “The experience helped me realize how much I’ve learned at BUSPH, and I’m so grateful for the education.”
What Irizarry-Delgado is most grateful for though, is that her mother is finally cancer-free.
“I feel that focusing my career on cancer research and science is a good way to give back to the field that gave my mom her life back,” she says.
