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Junior Lands Internship at Harvard
 Maliha Hashmi, a junior premedical student, collects knowledge and bits of information the way most people pick up lint. In the best possible sense, she's a sponge, absorbing facts, making connections and using a network of professors, friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers to move closer toward her goal. And anyone who has spent a few minutes with this sparkly, self-confident young woman has no doubt that one day she will, indeed, become a pediatric neurosurgeon.
Seeking as broad an experience as possible, she already has found her way into several hospitals. She has volunteered at the University of Pennsylvania Children's Hospital and at the Kennedy Krieger Institute at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. She has worked at the King Fahd Hospital and the Nora Hospital of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. In December, her Junior Fellows project took her to the Mayo Hospital in Lahore, Pakistan.
But she caught the shiny brass ring in April when she found out she was accepted into a seven-week honors research program at Harvard Medical School. Hashmi, a biology and psychology major, will run clinical trials on patients for the head of the anesthesiology department at Harvard's affiliate hospital, Massachusetts General. The only undergraduate accepted into the program, Hashmi will be working with two first-year medical students from Harvard on a project looking at anti-receptors for neuropathic pain.
"Sometimes, people with spinal injuries have such a low threshold for pain that if someone even touches them, it hurts," Hashmi says. "Dr. Christine Sang, the head of the clinical trials program at Harvard Medical School, hopes to develop a new drug therapy that blocks that supersensitivity."
Hashmi heard about Sang's research program through a friend who is studying neurosurgery at Harvard. He knew of Dr. Sang's work, and knew she was looking for highly motivated students. "He referred me to her," Hashmi says, "and I kept calling her until she called me back. I sent her my information, and then we talked for two hours on the phone. I told her I knew I was at a disadvantage because I couldn't come to meet her in Boston, but that I was confident I could do the work. When she told me I'd be working 80 hours a week-in addition to the clinical trials I'd be helping organize data-I told her that was no problem."
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