University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

She's an OBGYN and a women's health physician.

She graduated from Texas A&M University and then went on to earn her medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

She completed her residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where she won the prestigious Medicus Award for outstanding clinical care, knowledge, teaching, and dedication to compassion and professionalism.

As a woman, wife, and mother, Dr. Mascaro has an appreciation for the specific needs of her patients.

Will that anxiety go, too, once the voting's over? Let's talk about it now with Dr.

Lokesh Shahani, assistant professor and psychiatrist at UT Health Houston.

Dr. Shahani, good morning.

Good morning, Craig.

Or, you know, just be here at 8 p.m. and, you know, do my morning news, my afternoon news, my evening news and set strict boundaries.

That could be something healthy if you're not able to control the doom scrolling part of things.

Dr. Lokesh Shahani is an assistant professor and psychiatrist at UT Health Houston.

Dr. Shahani, thank you very much.

But I'm going to take you back to, I think I want to say around 2013, 2014.

I was a medical student attending UT Houston, living right in the heart of downtown Houston.

And as a young adult in that space, I had this emerging professional identity.

And on top of that, you know, I was wrestling with my sexual identity and really trying to come to terms with what that meant, you know, who I was, how to express that for the first time, really.

That's just what it was.

I ended up doing a year of MIS in UT Houston because when I finished training, I had no robotic exposure and I really wanted to become a robotic surgeon and When I did that, the guy was taking a break from robotic surgery, so I still didn't get my robotic exposure.

So I ended up doing then my colorectal, my ACGME colorectal fellowship in Erie, Pennsylvania.

And then after that, I transitioned into a hospital role in Illinois and then private practice.

So a passion that's rooted in her family's own personal history of health experiences.

For 12 years, she's led the diabetic programming within the UT Physicians Women's Clinic at McGovern Medical School at UT Health.

That's actually where we met when I was doing my residency.

Part of the Texas Medical Center in Houston, building and designing programs, strategy, clinical training, and research integration, including processes and embedding programming for diabetes in pregnancy and more recent expansion into women's health more broadly, including PCOS, now PMOS, and perimenopause.

So that's what I wanted to do.

So I went to undergrad at Baylor, but then UT Houston Medical School, MD Anderson is where I did most of my rotations, which is a world-renowned, famous, mostly cancer hospital.

And so the Texas Medical Center is an amazing place.

Two medical schools, a pharmacy school, a nursing school, lots of hospitals, this multi-acre complex in Houston.

I mean, it just proclaims that.

And, of course, I thought, no way could that be true.

How could you, Dr. Fitt, up in Amarillo, Texas, be right? And all my endocrine chronology professors at UT Houston, the Texas Medical Center, MD Anderson, be wrong.

And Hopkins and Harvard and the American Diabetes Association and CDC and all that.

I think this is a very good question.

In fact, I was, thank you for asking, I was in UT Houston for many years, 10 years, and I was very lucky at some point, somebody bring phage to my lab, not to me initially, to somebody else, but they fail, so I collect some tomogram, so I get a structure of individual phage state because during some kind of I think it's like a hurricane so the phage became lice there by itself so you end up with a different stage of infection and that's how we published the first paper but then my collaborator who who is actually a cryo-EM expert he always cussed me there's no advantage you to do cryo-ET structure of phage because single particle is so powerful you can classify them so in the end you have nothing so the the initial idea is can we see phage host interaction and that's how we we started, we start with phage host interaction as a concept.

Can we start it? Then obviously, people already started, so extensively.

This is one of the paper I show you.