The 12th annual Gerald R. Fink ’62 Bioscience Symposium will be held Jan. 23, with discussion revolving around the theme “Science and Medicine: From Amherst to the Laboratory, Medical School and Beyond.”

Established in 2009 in honor of Gerald R. Fink ’62, the annual symposium provides an opportunity for students who aspire to careers in health care policy, medicine and bioscience research to interact with Amherst alumni who are leaders in these fields.

The symposium will convene at 3 p.m. in Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall. It is sponsored and directed by the members of the Amherst class of 1962.

Harvey Lodish, founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and professor of biology and biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the keynote address.

Lodish is the lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. His lab studies diseases associated with red blood cell formation and the role of fat cells in obesity and diabetes. He will present a talk on “Academic Entrepreneurs, New Technologies and Building Companies to Treat Disease: A Personal History.”

The symposium will kick off with introductory remarks by George Carmany ’62, who founded the gathering with his 1962 classmate Gerald R. Fink, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor and the American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Carmany is a Boston-based investor in health care, former chairman of Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Advisory Committee on Education at Harvard Medical School.

Robert Mignone ’62, founder and director of Stone Bridge Psychiatric Associates and author of Ordinary Valor: How Prostate Cancer Saved My Life and How You Can Save Yours, and Marc Pohl ’62, former head of Clinical Hypertension and Nephrology at the Cleveland Clinic, will give a presentation on “The Medicine of Aging.” 

The other speakers, all Amherst alumni, are:

  • Dick Aronson ’69, Amherst’s assistant dean of students and health professions advisor
  • Sinead Murphy ’12, clinical fellow in pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital, who will speak on “Finding Your Fit in Medicine”
  • Niyi Odewade ’15, second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School now in clinical rotations at Massachusetts General Hospital. He will talk about his research on how anesthesia care is delivered in low- and middle-income countries
  • Kipp Weiskopf ’07, resident physician at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and cancer therapy researcher, who will give a talk on “Discovering New Immune Therapies for Cancer”

The day will also include a presentation from Hilary Bediako ’19, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She formerly served on the board of the Amherst College Association for Women in Science.

Amherst students are invited to register for the symposium.