Internal Medicine Resident PGY-1
Stanford Medicine
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Victoria Avanzato, MD DPhil, is a PGY-1 in the Stanford Internal Medicine/Global Health Track Residency, and the Translational Investigator Program (TIP) for Infectious Disease. Victoria completed her undergraduate years at the Pennsylvania State University, Schreyer Honors College, where she completed a double major in Immunology and Infectious Disease, and Toxicology. She was a member of the Penn State Global Medical Brigades, through which she worked in Panama, Ghana and Nicaragua. She then pursued her MD/PhD training through Emory University School of Medicine and the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, where she received her DPhil in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Oxford and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories (NIH), mentored by Vincent J. Munster (NIH) and Thomas A. Bowden (Oxford). Initially, her dissertation research focused on characterizing monoclonal antibodies against the Nipah virus surface glycoproteins using X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, but during the pandemic, she quickly shifted to focus on serology responses to COVID-19 vaccines. She also studied prolonged viral shedding from immunocompromised patients persistently infected with SARS-CoV-2. As a medical student at Emory, she spent 1 month studying neonatal sepsis practices and outcomes in Ethiopia as an ASTMH Benjamin Kean Fellow, and she also spent 2 months participating in the Epidemiology Elective Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Victoria then matched to the Stanford Internal Medicine/Global Health Track for residency, as well as the Translational Investigator Program (TIP) for Infectious Disease. She plans to pursue a career as a physician-scientist in infectious diseases and hopes to continue studying emerging viruses, antibody responses, and global health.