Dr Daniel Gould

I loved hearing about your pathway earlier when we were chatting.

How did you get started? When did you decide that medicine was for you?

Yeah, so my father's a pediatrician, but he always told me not to go into medicine my whole life.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, I had a boss.

I was doing a lot of scientific research in ALS And I had a research mentor, Dr. Joan Valentine, who told me, you've got to do an MD because you're not really a lab rat.

She thought I was way too social to be like hidden away in a dungeon.

So she introduced me to someone who was the leader of like an MD PhD program.

And that person told me I should apply for a combination program, which was NIH funded, where you do research and also medicine.

So I applied.

I went to Baylor College of Medicine.

I also got a PhD at Rice University in bioengineering.

And during my engineering PhD, I learned a lot about tissue engineering.

So a lot of my focus at the time was on regenerative medicine, creating new tissues and new constructs using regenerative constructs that contained PDGF, FGF, and VEGF.

Wow.

Which are the things that we talk about all day long now.

Yes.

So I did a PhD.

I learned how to make tissue engineered constructs, different materials like polyethylene glycol, diacrylate, all the science.

And then felt like that was a good mix for plastic surgery because plastic surgery is mostly regenerative medicine.

And I was doing microsurgery in my research.

And so then I found mentors.

I had mentors at Baylor College of Medicine that were plastic surgeons.

Dr. Kronowitz at MD Anderson, a handful of other surgeons at Baylor itself.

Dr. Stahl, who was a pediatric surgeon.

And they all shepherded me into plastic surgery.