Lily Charron
Lily Charron is currently a third-year medical student at the Drexel University College of Medicine’s West Reading Campus. She plans to apply to psychiatry for residency and has specific interests in consult-liaison psychiatry, addiction medicine, and neuropsychiatry. She is originally from Lexington, MA.
My interest in the brain and human behavior began in high school, where I was situated right next to the major medical centers of Boston. I was fortunate to intern at several research labs at Mass General and Beth Israel Hospital devoted to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and the role of sleep in cognition. While I enjoyed research, I was eager to work directly with patients and thus decided to pursue a career in medicine. I attended Hamilton College, majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies, where I also managed the EMT service on campus. At one of my summer positions, I saw a research presentation about cases of unexplained chronic pain in patients with a history of psychological trauma. This changed the way I viewed mental health in medicine and inspired my senior thesis on pain sensitivity in a model of PTSD in rats.
After graduating from Hamilton, I worked for two years at the Yale Stress Center where I interviewed participants with alcohol and cocaine use disorders about the role of stress in their addiction and explored the potential use of new treatments. This experience drove my interest in pursuing psychiatry.
As a third-year medical student at Drexel University College of Medicine, my passion for mental health and the way it affects our physical health has only grown during my clinical rotations.
While psychiatry is often thought of as a separate entity to other medical fields, I have observed many cases where mental and physical well-being are tightly woven together and hope to explore that intersection in my future medical experiences.
At Drexel, I have been extremely lucky to have research mentors that allow me to explore new topics that strike me, such as my recent inquiry into hyperbaric oxygen therapy for PTSD. I have been able to continue volunteering for street medicine at the Hope Rescue Mission here in Reading, learning to provide care to those with little other support. I have really enjoyed exploring psychiatry’s intersection with other medical fields and hope to further explore addiction psychiatry, consult-liaison psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry as I consider my future endeavors.
As my schedule has become increasingly busy, I have also learned to prioritize my own mental health. I make time for old hobbies and continue to pursue new ones such as crocheting, reading, lifting, and completing (attempting) my daily crossword!