EP228: Science, Self, and Sisterhood: Insights from Dr. Carolyn Lee

Dr. Carolyn Lee on Comfort Zones, Identity, and Creating Your Own Path in Medicine

Christine welcomes her friend and colleague Dr. Carolyn Lee, MD, PhD, a Yale- and Georgetown-trained dermatologist and Stanford residency graduate now at UVA, who is an epithelial biologist and entrepreneur focused on high-risk skin cancer and developing new anti-cancer therapeutics. Lee shares a childhood anecdote about avoiding the unknown and reflects on how growth happens at the edge of comfort, despite intimidation and failure. They discuss juggling multiple identities and interests, parenting mixed-race children after moving from the diverse Bay Area to Charlottesville, and the importance of maintaining hobbies and “many legs” of identity beyond work and family. Lee describes how being an Asian American woman shaped her experiences later in her career, including stereotypes, feeling “betrayed,” and learning to create her own path without templates, ending with advice: take opinions as opinions and do what you want to do.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

01:12 Comfort Zone Story

03:05 Growth at the Edge

03:42 Wearing Many Hats

05:54 Keeping Identity Beyond Work

07:25 Asian American in Medicine

09:10 Stereotypes and Belonging

11:47 No More Templates

12:40 Mentor Advice and Wrap Up

Transcript

Christine Ko: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Girl Doc Survival Guide. Today, I am very excited to be with my friend and colleague, Dr. Carolyn Lee. Carolyn Lee, MD, PhD, attended Yale University, Georgetown University School of Medicine, and completed dermatology residency at Stanford University. She's also an epithelial biologist and entrepreneur, specializing in high-risk skin cancer and working toward developing new anti-cancer therapeutics.

Welcome to Cari. 

Cari Lee: Hi, Christine. It's a good thing this is a podcast because my face is bright red from that very kind introduction. 

Christine Ko: I didn't even go into all of your accomplishments! I am a big fan of Cari's, and I twisted her arm to do this with me because I am personally really proud of her that she is a woman in science, an accomplished dermatologist, and epithelial biologist. And not only that, [00:01:00] she is working towards creating new, better therapies for patients. All of that is just amazing, and it's inspiring to me and others. Thank you for doing this. Can you share a personal anecdote? 

Cari Lee: At this particular juncture, I am now at UVA from Stanford, after having been on the West Coast for many years. Although I will say I'm a girl from Queens, so in many ways this was coming home for me. The anecdote I would share would be one that my mother has told me a number of times, which probably dates back to when I was in first grade or so, and the writing prompt was, " Christopher Columbus has asked you to join him on his quest to find the Indies. What do you say?" And I don't remember this, but my mother tells me my response basically boiled [00:02:00] down to, "I would tell him thank you, but no thank you. I'm gonna stay where I am because I'm comfortable here. Bye." And my mother likes to say that she was really pretty worried for a long time that this child had zero desire to explore the unknown. In many ways, that is true of me. Like many of us, I enjoy staying in the space where I feel really comfortable. At the same time, what's intimidating and at the same time wonderful, what's hard, and not for the faint of heart: the rewards can be tremendous. If I can change from someone who would've just said, "No thanks" to Christopher Columbus, perhaps there's hope for many of us. 

Christine Ko: That's funny. I thought you were gonna say that Christopher Columbus asked you to go with him, and I thought you were gonna say, "No, I'm gonna find my own country." 

Cari Lee: No, I was like, "I'm good where I am." Gonna stay with my friends and [00:03:00] family. 

Christine Ko: This story makes me feel inspired by you even more. For me, I always feel I make the most progress in whatever when I'm at the edge of where I feel comfortable, and I feel maybe a little intimidated or a lot intimidated. But that's when really positive change, not always, can happen. And of course, a lot of failures too. 

Cari Lee: To your point, yes, probably the best place for us to be is right on that edge of being a little uncomfortable. It's something that I have to, I think, really consciously work on. 

Christine Ko: You make it look easy.

So I've mentioned that you're a dermatologist and an epithelial biologist, and you just mentioned you were at Stanford, and now you're at UVA, but you grew up in Queens. I also wanted to talk to you about identity and how you make it or [00:04:00] not, in terms of different identities. 

Cari Lee: When we talk about identities I think many of us wear multiple hats. Professionally, I am a scientist, and I'm also a clinician. I see patients. And I'm also a girl who likes shoes and online shopping. Own a lot of makeup that seems to not make it on my actual face. I have a very good friend at Stanford, who's quite brilliant in the AI world, Roxana Daneshjou. One time I said something along the lines of, "Don't tell anyone, but I really like shoes." And she said, "Why can't we like both?" And I thought a lot about that, and it also does remind me a little bit about America Ferrera's famous, now infamous, dialogue in the Barbie movie where she says we have to be pretty but not too pretty, and always be grateful. Or thin, but not say you wanna be thin. You wanna be healthy, but actually you wanna be thin, right? These [00:05:00] contradictions. So there are a lot of different parts of my identities. I'm somebody who's born in New York, and I'm Chinese, right? And my kids are mixed. So what does that mean for them and how they're perceived is another topic that I think about. Having moved from the Bay Area, where there's a lot of diversity, to Charlottesville where there's a little less, I've thought about it for my children. 

Christine Ko: Yeah. These questions of identity are, for me, not easy, and it becomes even more complicated when it comes to your child, a kid, and you want to help them eventually figure out who they are. But then sometimes I'm like, " How do I help this child craft an identity?"

Cari Lee: Yeah, at the life stage that we're in, where life is very [00:06:00] busy professionally, if one has children, life is very busy as a parent. It's really easy to forget about one's hobbies And a lot of times I have difficulty, thinking, what are my hobbies? One of the great challenges for working women or working parents is not losing your sense of the other parts of your identity. It's funny because it's so easy to talk to our children about this, right? I will tell my kids, "You have your friends at school, you have your friends at swim, you have your friends from camp." Now they have friends from California and friends in Virginia. And it's like you are a table with many legs, and I love it because if one leg falls, you have other legs to support you.

You might be a little rickety, but you will still be standing. But if you only have [00:07:00] two or three legs to your stool and one of them goes out for whatever reason, it will be really challenging to pick yourself up. So we tell our kids some variation of this. And yet when it comes to ourselves, to find the time to exercise or to find the time to do things that bring us happiness outside of our job and our family is hard. 

Christine Ko: Yeah. I'm gonna move on to a slightly different topic. We were talking about identities. Has it influenced you being in science and medicine as an Asian American woman? 

Cari Lee: That's a good question. So I grew up in Queens, New York, and I would say I thought about the fact that I was Asian very little. Not zero, because the first part of my education was in a private school where the class size was small, maybe 12, and in that group, maybe two of us were Asian. So I do [00:08:00] remember always hoping the other Asian person was nice so that I could be friends with them. But then when I left that school, starting fifth grade, I really didn't think about diversity at all. I was very fortunate to not really feel the challenges of being an Asian female who wanted to pursue a career in medicine and science and academia. I credit a lot of that to my parents because not once did I ever think about a glass ceiling or a bamboo ceiling, any of that. Because I think often when you are somebody's trainee or somebody's student, it gives you a certain amount of immunity. I was fortunate in that it had not affected me in the early stages of my career. And at the same time because I was fortunate in that regard, I was a little [00:09:00] bit ill-prepared to be aware of challenges, manage it, when I was finally in my first independent position. Since that point, I've thought a little bit more about it and I've read a little bit about it, and thought about what the stereotypes are, for example, for Asians, and you know these. We're apparently very respectful of authority. We're not the squeaky wheel. We're not necessarily creative, but we really are hardworking. And there are grains of truth on that, like I will say, it is very difficult for me to not want to recognize someone who's older or senior, and my assumption is always that they must know what they're talking about. And at the same time, I've learned that seniority alone or age alone does not mean that someone knows what they're talking [00:10:00] about, and that's something maybe I didn't always realize. 

Christine Ko: Yeah. Yeah. Very true. I feel like in some ways we don't really think about these things until somehow they're pointed out to us, and we don't really know, maybe, what we're missing until they're pointed out. 

Cari Lee: I will also say that it feels like a betrayal, right? Because when I grew up, I really did just assume that I was the same as everybody else, Asian or not Asian, female or not female, right? And so when you experience these, whether they be big or small, minor things or major things, it feels like a betrayal because I was born here. If someone says, "Where are you from?" I always say, Queens, New York. That's where I'm from. And yet, things are not perfect yet. And I spend a lot of time thinking about this, as I'm sure you do, as a parent. And I take quite seriously that [00:11:00] one of the things that sort of propels me to keep going is that as imperfect as things are now, if we want them to be better for our children, I don't think we can reasonably expect things to change unless somebody keeps going. Keep soldiering on. 

Christine Ko: You are a physician scientist at UVA with tenure. That's amazing. It's not easy to achieve, and someone else will see you in that position and think, "Oh, wow," "That's exactly what I wanna do," or even, "That's similar to what I wanna do. I wanna do it a little differently, but similar."

I agree, it feels like a betrayal in some ways when you start thinking about this stuff. It's maybe more I feel that sometimes I betrayed myself by internalized stereotypes.

Cari Lee: Yeah. I agree. For a very long time, I've been very good at following the examples that have been well carved out and following those templates. And at the same time, I've come to realize that I might be at [00:12:00] a point where there are no more templates. My poor mother spent a lifetime worrying that I have not an adventurous bone in my body. It's a scary and also freeing thing to realize that maybe this is an opportunity to truly create one's own path. Maybe we have not been giving ourselves enough credit by just following the predetermined paths. Those thoughts compel me to maybe venture out a little bit more and try something new.

Christine Ko: That's awesome. Do you have any final thoughts? 

Cari Lee: Final thoughts. I had a great mentor at Georgetown when I was a graduate student. Todd Waldman. When he gave advice, he would always preface by saying, " You should do what you wanna do," and then he would give me the advice. And I think that's what I would say to [00:13:00] anyone who's listening or wondering what they should do. Do what you wanna do. You should always take someone else's advice or opinion as that, not as fact or dogma, but just their opinion, and then do what you wanna do. 

Christine Ko: I like it. I love all your insights. I'm so glad that I got to spend this time with you.