Inside-Out Leadership:  Human Leadership and Mental Health with Dr. Alison Van Dyke

Erratum: Dear listeners, we wanted to correct information from this episode. The NCI SEER Cancer Registries ascertains over 500,000 cancer cases not 500 million as mentioned .

Dr. Alison Van Dyke joined the Data Quality, Analysis, and Interpretation Branch of the Surveillance Research Program (SRP) as Director of the SEER-linked Virtual Tissue Repository (VTR) Pilot Studies. For the VTR Pilot Studies, SRP works with SEER registries to obtain custom annotations of detailed treatment data for pancreas and female breast cancer cases which may have biospecimens available. The goal is to match unusual survival cases with more typical survival controls. Dr. Van Dyke also directs the Residual Tissue Repositories (RTRs). Operated by the SEER registries in Hawaii, Iowa, and Los Angeles, the RTRs collect tissue being discarded by hospital laboratories once the minimum requirement for retaining diagnostic tissue blocks, as set forth by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), has been met.

Dr. Van Dyke earned her MD/PhD from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 2011 with graduate training in cancer biology. She completed postgraduate medical residency training in anatomic pathology at Yale-New Haven Hospital and surgical subspecialty training in thoracic pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In addition to being board certified in Anatomic Pathology by the American Board of Pathology, she is a Fellow of the CAP and serves as the SEER Liaison to the CAP Cancer Committee, which determines what and how tumor information will be reported in pathology reports.

Dr. Van Dyke completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics (DCEG). Working with Drs. Jill Koshiol and Eric Engels in DCEG, Dr. Van Dyke's postdoctoral research focused on the incorporation of surgical pathology in epidemiologic research. She utilized data from the NCI Cancer Cohort Consortium to investigate the epidemiology of biliary tract cancers. She was also the first researcher to use the digital slide collection from the National Lung Screening Trial to investigate the relationships between lung scarring characteristics and lung cancer development. In addition, she established pathology tissue collection and evaluation methods for Dr. Koshiol’s Chile Biliary Longitudinal Study (Chile BiLS). She is completing a NAACCR project examining biliary tract cancer incidence trends in the United States.

In this episode we discuss her path to being a MD/PhD,  some of the projects she is working on currently at the NCI, the lessons she learned from living with Bipolar Disorder, and her experience as a woman in STEM. 

Questions we posed include: 

• What it means to you to be a physician-scientist and why you chose this path? 
• How does balancing these two professional identities affect your leadership philosophy? 
• What things outside of medical school, research, and residency have you done that most impacted your leadership development? 
• What are some Challenges/barriers that you faced? 
• Why do you still think there is still such a stigma surrounding mental health? 
• What needs to be emphasized during the training of young medical and scientific leaders in order to improve the culture?
•  Do you have any personal stories where you felt that you were discriminated against by your peers for your gender?
• What message do you want to send to our listeners that may feel discriminated against based on their gender, race, etc? 
• What are your favorite books? 
• What advice do you have for medical trainees?