In your Personal Statement, please address the following points:
Why are you interested in science?
What scientific problems are of current interest to you?
Explain how you have prepared yourself for graduate training. Include a description of any research you have conducted (as appropriate).
Why is Roswell Park a good fit for your graduate training?
Applicants may discuss any circumstances that impacted their training and education thus far.
Essay:
My aunt was part of one of the first cohorts of community health workers recruited in India in 2005. They are known as ASHAs-Accredited Social Health Activists-a name that literally means "hope." For year, I simply understood her work as part of everyday community life. It was only later, during my masters, that I started to see the larger responsibility is embedded in that role: how much of the health system's success depends on workers positioned between institutions and communities, and what happens when those workers are expected to compensate for gaps in the system itself? I pursued these questions in my master's research which led me to take step back to understand community health workers' potential. Later on, these questions would follow me into my subsequent work on tuberculosis (TB) and health system transformation. As I worked extensively on various TB elimination program is complex health systems, I became less interested in whether a program could work under ideal support and more interested in why evidence-based interventions break down in real-world transitions, which mechanisms can close those gaps, and how successful strategies become routine. I saw health as a wicked problem. That shift, from witnessing public-health challenges to wanting to explain and test them, is what drew me to science.
India-often referred to as the global capital of tuberculosis-gave me ample opportunities to work on several projects spanning TB elimination, TB care across the life course, and post-TB survivorship. Across these experiences, I repeatedly encountered one persistent problem: even when effective interventions exist, people can still be lost when responsibility shifts across workers, services, and stages of care. Rather than asking, how to improve a program, I became interested in understanding why evidence-based interventions fail at transitions between communities and health systems, which mechanisms can close those gaps, and how successful strategies can become routine and sustainable. I was keen to solve problems around sciences of implementation itself. It was from this growing interest in implementation, continuity, and survivorship that my questions began to move beyond a single disease area. Building on these lessons from infectious disease research, I now want to understand how they can be applied to chronic disease prevention and survivorship, particularly in cancer. Solving this problem would also help prepare to contribute to cancer prevention research in India, a country facing a substantial and growing cancer burden. Specifically, I am interested in paediatric, adolescent, and young-adult cancer survivors, for whom HPV vaccination can be missed as care shifts from oncology to community primary care.
The path that prepared me to ask these questions, however, began much earlier. A rejected student research proposal became the beginning of my training as a researcher - but with a mentorship that did not fail me. An unexpected opportunity to work with that faculty member on a proposal for the Indian Council of Medical Research's Short Term Studentship program became my first real introduction to how research is conceived and conducted. Although the proposal failed to win funds, the process created space for me to learn - and, at times, unlearn - how approached evidence and inquiry. While still in dental school, I completed courses in research methodology, scientific writing for health research and attended workshops in epidemiology and biostatistical analysis using SPSS. More importantly, searching the literature, refining a question, and turning curiosity into a research design changed how I understood my own training and drew me more deeply into research. With the same mentor, I went on to contribute to studies examining how depression and stress influence oral self-care among perinatal women, the broader public-health implications of periodontal disease, and a randomized controlled trial evaluating a mouthwash intervention for periodontal health among people with type 2 diabetes. Working across these different questions introduced me to longitudinal research, intervention studies, literature synthesis, scientific writing, and the publication process. These projects gradually shifted my attention from treating oral disease in isolation toward understanding how clinical outcomes intersect with psychological, behavioural, and broader public-health factors.
For my masters, I designed and led a qualitative grounded-theory study to understand how gendered expectations, working conditions, work-life balance, coping strategies, and psychological well-being interacted in the lives of ASHAs in rural West Bengal. With guidance from my faculty advisor, I developed the research question and study design, conducted in-depth interviews, analyzed the data using ATLAS.ti, and synthesized participants' accounts into an empirical framework linking gender, coping, work-life balance, and well-being. The study pushed me to see ASHAs not simply as extensions of the health system, but as workers whose own social and organizational environments shape their capacity to deliver care. I translated these findings into recommendations for strengthening CHW well-being and support within the health system. What stayed with me most was not only the findings, but the research process itself.
Together, these experiences have brought me to the research questions I now hope to pursue at Roswell Park. I hope to investigate how evidence-based HPV vaccination strategies can be adapted for paediatric, adolescent, and young-adult cancer survivors transitioning from oncology to community primary care. I am particularly drawn to Dr. Elisa Rodriguez's work because it already brings together the core domains underlying this question: HPV vaccination, rural primary care, implementation science, mixed methods, and community-based participatory research. Her work provides the implementation foundation I hope to extend into the survivorship transition. In turn, I would bring experience studying CHWs and designing health-system strategies in which community actors help close gaps across referral, follow-up, and prevention. Together, these perspectives could support a new line of inquiry: determining where HPV vaccination breaks down during the oncology-to-primary-care transition, which barriers are amenable to CHW-supported navigation, and which require changes in clinical workflow and interorganizational communication.
Dr. Kathryn Glaser's research offers a complementary perspective because her work combines practice facilitation with patient education and navigation in community health centres while addressing cancer disparities, access, and survivorship. Her work raises a question that closely matches my own experience: how should patient-facing navigation and practice-level change be designed to reinforce one another? I would bring to this work a frontline-workforce perspective developed through my research with ASHAs and my experience with community-based TB models. I would therefore be interested in extending Dr. Glaser's navigation and practice-facilitation work by examining how CHWs could be embedded across oncology and primary-care settings, and what system conditions are necessary for that role to become sustainable rather than project-dependent.
In many ways, this brings me back to where my questions first began. The questions I want to study today were present in my life long before I knew how to name them. Watching my aunt work as an ASHA introduced me to the fragile space between communities and health systems; studying ASHAs and later working across TB care pathways taught me how to interrogate that space scientifically. I now want to carry those questions into cancer prevention and survivorship. At Roswell Park, I hope to deepen this work through implementation science and community base research, ultimately building a research career focused on making preventive care more equitable, continuous, and sustainable.
Why are you interested in science?
What scientific problems are of current interest to you?
Explain how you have prepared yourself for graduate training. Include a description of any research you have conducted (as appropriate).
Why is Roswell Park a good fit for your graduate training?
Applicants may discuss any circumstances that impacted their training and education thus far.
Essay:
My aunt was part of one of the first cohorts of community health workers recruited in India in 2005. They are known as ASHAs-Accredited Social Health Activists-a name that literally means "hope." For year, I simply understood her work as part of everyday community life. It was only later, during my masters, that I started to see the larger responsibility is embedded in that role: how much of the health system's success depends on workers positioned between institutions and communities, and what happens when those workers are expected to compensate for gaps in the system itself? I pursued these questions in my master's research which led me to take step back to understand community health workers' potential. Later on, these questions would follow me into my subsequent work on tuberculosis (TB) and health system transformation. As I worked extensively on various TB elimination program is complex health systems, I became less interested in whether a program could work under ideal support and more interested in why evidence-based interventions break down in real-world transitions, which mechanisms can close those gaps, and how successful strategies become routine. I saw health as a wicked problem. That shift, from witnessing public-health challenges to wanting to explain and test them, is what drew me to science.
India-often referred to as the global capital of tuberculosis-gave me ample opportunities to work on several projects spanning TB elimination, TB care across the life course, and post-TB survivorship. Across these experiences, I repeatedly encountered one persistent problem: even when effective interventions exist, people can still be lost when responsibility shifts across workers, services, and stages of care. Rather than asking, how to improve a program, I became interested in understanding why evidence-based interventions fail at transitions between communities and health systems, which mechanisms can close those gaps, and how successful strategies can become routine and sustainable. I was keen to solve problems around sciences of implementation itself. It was from this growing interest in implementation, continuity, and survivorship that my questions began to move beyond a single disease area. Building on these lessons from infectious disease research, I now want to understand how they can be applied to chronic disease prevention and survivorship, particularly in cancer. Solving this problem would also help prepare to contribute to cancer prevention research in India, a country facing a substantial and growing cancer burden. Specifically, I am interested in paediatric, adolescent, and young-adult cancer survivors, for whom HPV vaccination can be missed as care shifts from oncology to community primary care.
The path that prepared me to ask these questions, however, began much earlier. A rejected student research proposal became the beginning of my training as a researcher - but with a mentorship that did not fail me. An unexpected opportunity to work with that faculty member on a proposal for the Indian Council of Medical Research's Short Term Studentship program became my first real introduction to how research is conceived and conducted. Although the proposal failed to win funds, the process created space for me to learn - and, at times, unlearn - how approached evidence and inquiry. While still in dental school, I completed courses in research methodology, scientific writing for health research and attended workshops in epidemiology and biostatistical analysis using SPSS. More importantly, searching the literature, refining a question, and turning curiosity into a research design changed how I understood my own training and drew me more deeply into research. With the same mentor, I went on to contribute to studies examining how depression and stress influence oral self-care among perinatal women, the broader public-health implications of periodontal disease, and a randomized controlled trial evaluating a mouthwash intervention for periodontal health among people with type 2 diabetes. Working across these different questions introduced me to longitudinal research, intervention studies, literature synthesis, scientific writing, and the publication process. These projects gradually shifted my attention from treating oral disease in isolation toward understanding how clinical outcomes intersect with psychological, behavioural, and broader public-health factors.
For my masters, I designed and led a qualitative grounded-theory study to understand how gendered expectations, working conditions, work-life balance, coping strategies, and psychological well-being interacted in the lives of ASHAs in rural West Bengal. With guidance from my faculty advisor, I developed the research question and study design, conducted in-depth interviews, analyzed the data using ATLAS.ti, and synthesized participants' accounts into an empirical framework linking gender, coping, work-life balance, and well-being. The study pushed me to see ASHAs not simply as extensions of the health system, but as workers whose own social and organizational environments shape their capacity to deliver care. I translated these findings into recommendations for strengthening CHW well-being and support within the health system. What stayed with me most was not only the findings, but the research process itself.
Together, these experiences have brought me to the research questions I now hope to pursue at Roswell Park. I hope to investigate how evidence-based HPV vaccination strategies can be adapted for paediatric, adolescent, and young-adult cancer survivors transitioning from oncology to community primary care. I am particularly drawn to Dr. Elisa Rodriguez's work because it already brings together the core domains underlying this question: HPV vaccination, rural primary care, implementation science, mixed methods, and community-based participatory research. Her work provides the implementation foundation I hope to extend into the survivorship transition. In turn, I would bring experience studying CHWs and designing health-system strategies in which community actors help close gaps across referral, follow-up, and prevention. Together, these perspectives could support a new line of inquiry: determining where HPV vaccination breaks down during the oncology-to-primary-care transition, which barriers are amenable to CHW-supported navigation, and which require changes in clinical workflow and interorganizational communication.
Dr. Kathryn Glaser's research offers a complementary perspective because her work combines practice facilitation with patient education and navigation in community health centres while addressing cancer disparities, access, and survivorship. Her work raises a question that closely matches my own experience: how should patient-facing navigation and practice-level change be designed to reinforce one another? I would bring to this work a frontline-workforce perspective developed through my research with ASHAs and my experience with community-based TB models. I would therefore be interested in extending Dr. Glaser's navigation and practice-facilitation work by examining how CHWs could be embedded across oncology and primary-care settings, and what system conditions are necessary for that role to become sustainable rather than project-dependent.
In many ways, this brings me back to where my questions first began. The questions I want to study today were present in my life long before I knew how to name them. Watching my aunt work as an ASHA introduced me to the fragile space between communities and health systems; studying ASHAs and later working across TB care pathways taught me how to interrogate that space scientifically. I now want to carry those questions into cancer prevention and survivorship. At Roswell Park, I hope to deepen this work through implementation science and community base research, ultimately building a research career focused on making preventive care more equitable, continuous, and sustainable.
