Determined To Improve Quality of Life, Patient by Patient and Systemwide

Graduating MD/PhD student Emily Rencsok journeys through bioengineering, epidemiology, rehabilitation

By MIKE CAMPBELL Education

5 min read

A woman leans on a banister and smiles at the camera
Emily Rencsok. Image: Gretchen Ertl

When Emily Rencsok was a teenager, she saw the transformative effect a double knee replacement had on her grandmother.

“It was night and day,” Rencsok remembered. “She was having trouble walking and was in a lot of pain, and within a couple days, she was up and walking around.”

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The daughter of a preschool special-education teacher and an electric motor repairman, Rencsok didn’t know anyone in science or medicine — but her grandmother’s experience got her interested in bioengineering.

“I wanted to design devices so people could walk better or do tissue engineering so people could have better cartilage repair,” she said.

She started down a path that eventually led to the MD/PhD program in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). Thanks to the influence of mentors and chance experiences, Rencsok found a home in epidemiology, earning her PhD from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2023. When she graduates with her MD in May, she’ll head into physical medicine and rehabilitation training.

She hopes to combine direct patient care with her expertise in public health, statistics, and the social factors that influence disease to build public trust and form a more equitable and accessible health system.

A funny thing happened on the way to bioengineering

As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, Rencsok found herself surrounded by students doing research and pre-med studies. Despite not knowing any doctors aside from her pediatrician and having never picked up a pipette, Rencsok jumped in, shadowing physicians and trying her hand at research.

She planned on running a bioengineering lab and becoming a pediatric oncologist when a gap year between college and HMS changed her focus.

She conducted sociology research with one of her professors, interviewing people who had moved out of Baltimore City on government-subsidized housing vouchers. She worked for a STEM pipeline program for middle schoolers in West Baltimore and at Thread, a community impact organization supporting young people in Baltimore, which taught her about the diverse factors that impact people’s well-being.

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Everything combined into a realization that she had an interest in population health, community organizing, and health policy.

When Rencsok arrived at HMS in 2017, a friend suggested epidemiology might be a good fit. She had to Google the field. “And Google basically said it was the application of mathematical models to human disease with a focus on social determinants of health and health equity. That sounded really interesting.”

Around the same time, Rencsok learned about HST and the flexibility it offered to choose a new path for her PhD studies.

“For someone who did bioengineering and was really interested in getting a strong foundation in the mechanisms underlying disease before going on to clinical things, HST was just the coolest and most unique program that exists,” she said.

Fielding curveballs

Rencsok chose to work in the Genitourinary Cancer Epidemiology Group run by Lorelei Mucci, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School, during her first year at HMS. Less than six months in, Mucci invited her to travel to Nigeria to present on IRONMAN, an international registry of men with advanced prostate cancer Mucci has spearheaded.

“Lorelei was a superstar in terms of giving me those sorts of opportunities, connecting me to people I wouldn’t have met otherwise,” Rencsok said. “She became truly like family to me.”

Rencsok decided to pursue her doctorate with Mucci as her advisor. She studied racial disparities in quality-of-life outcomes for patients with prostate cancer and furthered the lab’s efforts — including in Kenya, Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas — to make IRONMAN more inclusive of the people who shoulder the heaviest burden of the disease worldwide.

The work infused Rencsok’s PhD and MD studies with a newfound understanding that certain groups are underrepresented in clinical trials because such opportunities aren’t offered where those patients receive health care.

Another twist arrived when the COVID-19 pandemic struck during the first year of Rencsok’s PhD work. The experience spurred her to include patients as co-authors on her dissertation to ensure that her research was understandable and relevant to members of the public. It also instilled a desire to build public trust in health care institutions by ensuring they serve all people.

A home at HMS

Rencsok appreciates the chances she has been offered at HMS and MIT.

“The opportunities we get as part of HST are just wild,” she said.

In her first year, she marveled at participating in a mock cardiac catheterization and observing the effects of the various injected drugs. She worked with tabletop MRIs, a technology she hadn’t known existed. She shadowed an autopsy as part of her pathology class.

She fell hard for how HST faculty and students consider disease, from established mechanisms and interventions to knowledge gaps and discussions of how researchers are working to fill them. And she thrilled at getting a “glimpse into how medicine might change over the next 20 to 30 years.”

She also valued the breadth of exposure gained through classes or rotations at seven HMS-affiliated hospitals.

Matthew Frosch, the HMS Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pathology and Health Sciences and Technology at Mass General and director of admissions for HST, and Junne Kamihara, PME associate director of HST at HMS and advisor in the Irving M. London Society for HST students, helped Rencsok get involved in building a new course called Growth of the Physician Scientist, doing admissions work, and TA-ing two classes. She also became active in the nonpartisan voter registration program Vot-ER.

Rencsok has complemented her academic efforts with community building. Conducting epidemiology research and experiencing the isolation of the pandemic emphasized for her the value of support systems, as did becoming a mother in her final year of medical school.

Such experiences now fuel her desire to include in her career an investigation of “how we can bring people together and make a world that is more supportive again.”

Next steps

Rencsok, who lives in Newton with her husband and daughter, will complete her residency at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Physical medicine and rehabilitation appeals to her because it affords opportunities to both support patients’ recoveries and pursue her interests in disability advocacy, health policy, and trust building.

Still, given how much her plans changed in the past 10 years, Rencsok continues to allow herself space to discover where her path may lead.

“I’ve tried to expose myself to a lot of different things and not worry too much about what people want me to be or think an MD/PhD should be,” she said. “I think that’s given me the opportunity to find what I can contribute to the world.”