Damian Di Florio, Ph.D., remembers the lightning-bolt moment five years ago when he began thinking differently about the questions scientists ask. He was a summer undergraduate student working in the lab of cardiovascular researcher DeLisa Fairweather, Ph.D., when she and another scientist gave a lecture about vitamin D. The lab's studies had found stark differences between how vitamin D affects the heart function of male and female models of disease.
"That was the first alarm bell for me," says Dr. Di Florio, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Clinical and Translational Science at Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences under Dr. Fairweather's mentorship. "It made sense that sex differences would be an important feature of biology to consider in any type of research, and especially in cardiovascular disorders, which women and men experience differently..."
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