Growing up in a suburb outside of Houston, James Diao (he/him) always imagined he’d be an engineer for one of the area’s oil companies — just like his parents, and their friends, and his friends’ parents. That all changed when a high school research requirement threw him into the lab of a pediatric oncologist at Texas Children’s Hospital. Splitting time between caring for patients and coming up with the therapies to treat them “seemed like the coolest job in the world,” said Diao.
Ten years later, Diao has already made an impact on patients around the country. On the path to his M.D. at Harvard, he used his computer science training to research equity in clinical algorithms — including those that adjust their output depending on a patient’s race. As race-based tools became a leading issue in medicine after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, his papers analyzing the impacts of race and its removal from calculators for kidney function, lung capacity, and cardiovascular disease risk have played a role in policy decisions that touch millions of patients.
Now in his first year of residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Diao says he may end up practicing in cardiology. “Something clicked,” about the field, said Diao. He loved the high stakes of helping a patient with a heart attack. But cardiology is also an especially data-driven specialty, he said — a place where he could see his computer science and statistics chops making a real impact. “The field is moving really, really quickly and using all this data that it’s collecting for the benefit of the patient,” said Diao. “This is something I could really contribute to and be part of.”
— Katie Palmer
