Even early on, Brook Byrd knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life.
Growing up in James City County with a math teacher father, she gravitated toward science. After graduating from Warhill High School in 2013, she went to Christopher Newport University, where she studied physics and finished as valedictorian with a 4.0 grade point average.
Now with a doctorate under her belt, Byrd, 28, is planning to continue her mission to make health care more accessible in the field of medical physics.
As an undergraduate at CNU, Byrd began to recognize her desire to search out ethical causes and useful ways to apply her skills.
“I was always really good at math and physics,” she said. “So it came naturally. Once I got into college, I realized, yeah, I do have the skill for it. But knowing where to apply it in the most useful places, it was something that I was always searching for.”
After graduating from CNU, she did a yearlong stint at the University of Liverpool in England as a Fulbright Scholar, receiving her master’s degree. She then went on to Dartmouth College, where she graduated with her doctorate in engineering with a certificate in medical physics and surgical innovation program training. It’s the same training as a medical student would do for surgical rotations.
Byrd’s passion is finding ways to make breast cancer treatment more accessible to everyone who needs it. She’s been focused on affordable health care options since she was a teenager, when her aunt died from breast cancer, and she also watched other family members and friends fight the disease.
“Within the United States, the survival rate when you catch breast cancer in Stage 1 or 2 is like 95% for a five-year survival rate, but what it comes down to is access and education and making sure that people of all income levels get the help,” she said. “That was a case where she didn’t have the resources to get proper care. So in my eyes, that was a preventable death.”
According to statistics from cancer.net, the five-year survival rate for women in the United States with nonmetastatic invasive breast cancer is 91%. That rate goes up to 99% “if the invasive breast cancer is located only in the breast.”
Right now, Byrd is working to make MRIs more efficient for breast cancer patients, and therefore more affordable. According to Byrd, breast cancer patients get MRIs while laying on their stomachs, which enables oncologists to pinpoint where or not there is cancer on the scans. But if that patient needs surgery, they would need to get another MRI, this time on their back, for the surgeon. The first MRI would be covered by insurance, Byrd said, but not the second, which could cost about $8,000.
Byrd’s trial is looking for a way to make the first scan better and more efficient so the patient won’t need another.
As one might imagine, Byrd’s parents couldn’t be prouder.
“Dartmouth is no joke,” said her father, Bob Byrd. “There are some brains on that campus.”
Bob Byrd got a peek into his daughter’s life at Dartmouth when he and his wife, Nancy, went up to Hanover, New Hampshire, for graduation ceremonies in June. There, they watched Byrd marshal the doctoral students from the Thayer School of Engineering into the investiture ceremony, which is an honor awarded to students by their professors, before taking on the duty of leading everyone into the commencement ceremony the next day.
While she’s learned plenty in the classroom, empathy has always been one of Byrd’s strong points. Even with all of her talent, intellectual ability and achievements, the biggest thing she has going for her is kindness, Bob Byrd said.
One pivotal moment in her life came while she was in Liverpool as a Fulbright Scholar. Studying abroad, away from her friends, family and all that was familiar, was more difficult than Byrd expected, and she described it as one of the toughest and loneliest times in her life. When she arrived at Dartmouth, she made it a mission to help international students not have to feel the same way that she had.
“More than the academic experience, the challenge of living and working abroad taught me so much more about the world, and gave me a greater sense of empathy, cultural humility and a wider lens to see the world through,” she said.
Over the next three years, Byrd will complete her residency at the University of Pennsylvania, continuing to work to improve health care options for everyone.
“If I look back at the stepping stones, it was having fantastic mentors along the way,” she said. “A lot of my roots were in the Hampton Roads area, having communities and family that supported me in developing this real passion for taking care of other people.”
Sian Wilkerson, 757-342-6616, [email protected]