Where From Here?
When I entered a clinical trial in 2021, my immediate purpose was simple: to survive.
Five years later, I find myself asking different questions.
What can lived experience contribute to the way cancer research is designed? What happens when medical care, clinical research, private insurance, chronic illness, immigration and family responsibility all intersect in one life—but the systems supporting them remain separate? And how might artificial intelligence help connect what is currently fragmented without losing the human judgment and compassion that made such a difference to my own outcome?
My professional life has always been rooted in design. I have worked across clothing, interiors, real-estate development and business—not because these disciplines are identical, but because each required me to understand people, recognise connections and translate complex needs into something practical.
Cancer unexpectedly brought that instinct into healthcare.
Living for five years inside a clinical trial showed me both the extraordinary strength of medical research and the invisible work required to make that science reach a real person. Records, scans and trial data captured my disease with great discipline. They did not always capture the systems surrounding it, the administrative burden, the role of my daughter, the effect of another serious illness, or the people who repeatedly stepped beyond formal requirements to keep my care connected.
Artificial intelligence now interests me because it may help us see and connect some of what is currently scattered: years of clinical history, reports across providers, changes between appointments, practical burdens carried by families, and patterns hidden within individual experiences.
But the future I am interested in is not technology replacing people.
It is technology carrying more of the repetitive, administrative and pattern-recognition burden so that researchers and clinicians have more capacity for judgment, curiosity, partnership and care.
Six quiet observations from the inside travel with me into this work: people in trials create knowledge, not only data. Families participate too. Compassion influences outcomes. Continuity matters as much as access. AI can help bridge clinical records and lived experience. And every participant arrives with an entire life.
I do not come to this work claiming to have all the answers. I come with a life that has made the questions impossible to ignore, a designer's instinct to connect disciplines, and a genuine desire to help make the pathway better for the person who comes next.
I would welcome opportunities to contribute to consumer-engaged research, co-design, multidisciplinary exploration and emerging work where cancer, health systems and artificial intelligence meet.