Fifth year Johns Hopkins Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery resident Theresa Guo practically grew up in a hospital setting. The daughter of a radiologist, Guo and her sister made frequent visits to her mother’s workplace, spending countless hours volunteering by pulling films for doctors from the medical library.

“I had a good idea of what medicine looked like because of my mom,” Guo remembers.

When it came time to choose her own career, the answer was clear—she’d also be a doctor. But her specialty wasn’t as readily apparent.

During medical school at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Guo developed an interest in oncology and the responsibilities and privileges of accompanying patients through their cancer journeys. But over a yearlong research program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and studying melanoma, she also realized that she was interested in laboratory work. Her clinical rotations sparked a further interest in being in the operating room.

She found the perfect fit for combining each of these passions in otolaryngology–head and neck surgery. When she entered her residency program at Johns Hopkins in 2012, Guo found an ideal mentor in Joseph Califano, a former Johns Hopkins clinician-scientist who both treats and researches head and neck cancers.

Knowing that she wanted to follow in her mentor’s footsteps, Guo joined Califano’s lab as a T32 resident, funded by a grant from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute for up to three years of postdoctoral research training.

For two years, Guo worked in Califano’s lab along with his colleagues, learning techniques ranging from those used in a wet lab to computational biology. “I’ve never seen anyone learn the same amount that she did in that same amount of time,” says Daria Gaykalova, a Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck researcher who served as a co-mentor to Guo during her dedicated research time. “I’ve never seen anyone being as productive.”

Guo and her colleagues worked together to better understand a phenomenon known as alternative splicing, in which the same gene can make various forms of a protein depending on how cells arrange the resulting nucleic acid that the gene codes for. She and her team discovered a particular splice variant, known as AKT3, which appears to play a significant role in advancing cancers caused by human papillomavirus.

Guo is currently back in clinical training, but she remains closely connected to the lab, a link she plans to maintain throughout her subsequent fellowship and eventual long-term career.

“Each one of these new things that we’re trying to discover through our research represents a little more hope for patients,” she says. “Everything we do creates a platform for other people to also discover things. Together, we’ll eventually be able to develop cures.”