Inside My Lab: Adrienne Boire

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VIDEO | 02:04

Go inside the lab of Adrienne Boire from MSK’s Human Oncology & Pathogenesis Program.

Show transcript

The moment you find something new that hasn't been seen before, that's electric. It's amazing. And that's the reason that we all come to work every day. 

My name is Adrienne Boire and I'm a physician scientist. The big ideas in my laboratory, the big questions are, how does cancer get into the central nervous system? How does it live in this space? And how can we stop it? 

I take care of patients that have metastasis to the central nervous system. And they're extraordinarily ill. And I was pretty stymied by the lack of a real understanding that we had about how cancer was getting into this space and what to do once it got there. So it's this kind of combination of curiosity and compassion that really motivate me to do my work every day. 

I like to lead a very enthusiastic team. We study something that almost no one else studies in the entire world. 

"One sample from a patient who had lung cancer." 

Postdocs and graduate students can expect to see me a lot. I'm very hands on. And they can expect a lot of intellectual interplay, I guess, between other members of the laboratory and with me, as well as with other members of the brain tumor center. 

"One way to do that with a little more accuracy is to really think about the anatomy of the space that you're in." 

My philosophy of mentorship is that I'm a companion with the student or the postdoc on their road to answering a question. I'm really trying to prepare them to be scientists in whatever aspect of science they kind of land in later. 

Working in such an amazing environment that having access to world class collaborators, facilities, these patient samples. That all of this is incredibly electric. It's really a genuine pleasure to come to work every day and to do the kind of work that we do.