Women in STEM 2024: Irit Rasooly, MD, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics

My name is Dr. Irit Rasooly. I'm an assistant professor of Pediatrics in the Departments of General Pediatrics and Biomedical and Health Informatics. My research is focused on evaluating and improving diagnostic decision making. Diagnostic excellence is coming to a timely, accurate explanation of a patient's health problem and communicating that explanation effectively across the healthcare team and to the patient and family. It's a key part of delivering safe, high-quality care.

Our research group is focused on identifying the key opportunities to improve diagnosis in Pediatrics. We're learning about ways to support diagnostic decision making and we're collaborating with families to better communicate diagnostic uncertainty and clinical reasoning. We work closely with the patient safety team to operationalize and apply our findings in clinical care at CHOP.

The piece of advice I would offer to aspiring women in STEM is to remember that all your life experiences make you the researcher, the clinician, the person that you are. Sometimes I hear people describing time off or a gap year. It doesn't strike me as quite right. All the experiences that you have inside and outside work, in medicine as a clinician, in medicine as a patient, caring for children in the hospital, caring for children at home. They make you the researcher that you are. They shape the way you frame and understand questions, the way you analyze results, the collaborative relationships that you form. My advice would be don't undervalue those experiences.

I would also encourage women aspiring to careers in STEM to participate in grant writing groups and writing retreats, to work closely with their mentors as part of their mentors' research groups to review papers to find any opportunity you can to be in community with and immerse yourself in great science. Building community, forging deep collaborative research, and mentoring relationships takes intention in a digital remote work era, so prioritize and value those experiences. It takes intention in a digital remote work era, so prioritize and value those experiences.