Eduardo Maury first saw his father, Joaquin, a neurosurgeon, scrub in for an operation when Maury was 13. But that’s not what inspired him to go into medicine and science. In fact, his parents never tried to persuade him to be a doctor.
“But my dad, he loves medicine. He loves being a doctor and helping patients. It’s just like—it radiates from him. So obviously that was very contagious,” Maury said.
It was Maury’s father’s profession that provided the family with an opportunity to leave Holguín, the city in Cuba where he grew up, when Maury was 8 years old.
His father had attended a medical conference in Chile, and in a move to provide a more stable financial future for his family, Joaquin decided to immigrate there. Three years later, he was able to bring his wife, Silvia, and sons, Eduardo and Joaquin Jr., to Chile as well, where the family lived until they immigrated to the United States.
The years before the family was reunited in Chile were not easy for Maury, his brother, or their mother. The Cuban government did not take kindly to his father’s decision to leave. Maury said his family was ostracized and faced deprivation.
But the adversity they faced, and the strength his mother demonstrated protecting and providing for her children during those difficult years, made Maury more resilient—and may have helped him on his journey, he said.
“This attitude of pushing forward, recognizing that things are not perfect, and that you might be going through a difficult time and that things might not be going your way, but you need to persevere, not only for yourself but also for those around you,” he said.
“I think it just made us grow up very quickly in the sense of we’re going through a hardship right now, but we also understand the sacrifice that my parents were making for the hope of a better future,” he added.
The challenges he faced growing up may have also spurred his interest in helping patients with brain diseases, he said. His parents’ sacrifices for the family inspired him to want to assist others traversing difficult life situations.
Valuable mentors
As a teenager in Miami, Maury, now 29, relied on that acquired fortitude. He and his brother learned English well enough to apply to MIT, even though they thought their chances of acceptance were slim.
“We looked at what were the best schools for science and math. I think MIT and Harvard came up. Then we looked at the requirements, and we were like, ah, that’s funny. We don’t even speak English,” he said. “I was like, that was not going to happen.”
But Maury had been fortunate to find valuable mentors who helped him, first in high school, where DeEtta Mills, a scientist, allowed him to do microbiology projects in her forensics lab at Florida International University.
That experience helped him gain admission to MIT, where he majored in neuroscience, and where Emery Brown, the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital, became, Maury said, a great advocate and mentor.
As an undergrad, Maury became interested in neurological disorders, doing research into Alzheimer’s in the lab of Brad Hyman, the John B. Penney Jr. Professor of Neurology at HMS and Mass General.
“For me, people with neurological disorders—I found them very intriguing because these patients could be robbed of their identity. With Alzheimer’s, people could end up being just a shell of the person that they were,” he said.
“I got to interact a lot with patients with traumatic brain injury who also were struggling to get a sense of self and community, as well as through T.H.E. Brain Trust organization,” he said, referring to a nonprofit group whose goal is to improve the quality of life for people living with brain tumors and related conditions.
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Later, pursuing his doctorate at Harvard Medical School, Maury had the opportunity to work in the lab of Christopher Walsh, the Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at HMS and Boston Children’s Hospital, who Maury said is “doing very cutting-edge genetics to understand how the brain develops and works.”
“I thought that was a very interesting lens to look at disease through, and also to learn about how genomes are dynamically changed as our brains develop,” he said. “I’m also interested in now using this window of somatic mutations to understand neurological disorders, not only in adults, but also in pediatric cases.”
Just this spring, Maury was listed as a co-author on a study that found that Alzheimer’s patients have a greater number of different somatic mutations—normally occurring errors in the DNA of their brain cells—than people without Alzheimer’s disease. The study, published in Nature in April, may lead to insights into why so many brain cells die in Alzheimer’s.
Research has always proven to be compelling and gratifying for Maury, and that’s one of the reasons he chose to pursue an MD/PhD degree. He likes working in a team to gain new knowledge, and he enjoys trying to discover how that new knowledge might be used to reveal more about disease and to help people.
He feels there are limits to what he could do for patients solely as a doctor, but as a physician-scientist, he said, he may be able to find answers and cures for the future.
Somatic mutations
“For example, one of the genes that I found to be important in schizophrenia through somatic mutations may be related to treatment resistance in schizophrenia by affecting a key population of dopaminergic neurons. That’s something that potentially can help change the clinical management of these patients,” he said.
“In another paper, we found oncogenic mutations that you would usually expect in brain tumors in normal individuals. This could have the impact of assessing what it means to have a tumor—what the different stages are that you actually go through to develop a brain tumor.”
Maury said there is a great deal more to be learned through genomic research that will provide more insight into disease, and bioinformatics promises to open an even bigger window as it reveals patterns that may also help improve patient care.
Back in Miami, Maury’s father is still a practicing interventional neurologist; his mother manages the medical practice. Both are proud of Maury and the work he’s doing. His dad is particularly interested in his son’s research into somatic mutations.
As for Maury, he is enjoying mentoring the next generation of scientists and physicians, continuing to work with an MIT program called Laureates and Leaders that aims to assist underrepresented minorities who are interested in pursuing PhDs or MD/PhDs.
“For me at MIT, I got lucky because I had very good mentors who helped me through my journey. So, I was able to end up at Harvard for my training. But there was no guarantee. It was just very serendipitous for me. I want to create a sustainable way to provide that mentorship to others,” he said.
As a result, six years ago, Maury created a pre-MD/PhD advisory program at MIT to help undergraduate students going through the application process.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “Now, I see some people who I advised through the MD/PhD application process who are now interns or in medical school. It’s nice to see the full cycle.”
