From left: Chidinma “Chi-Chi” Osuagwu, LaShyra “Lash” Nolen, James Hocker and Bethany Fixsen are among the 245-plus medical students who learned on March 15 that they matched at the Brigham.

Across the 18 Brigham residency programs participating in Match Day on March 15, 2024 — when more than 44,000 medical school students across the country discovered where they will continue their medical training — over 245 aspiring physicians matched at the Brigham this year.

Among those incoming interns are 77 medical students who matched into the Brigham’s Internal Medicine Residency Program, the hospital’s largest residency program.

“We are thrilled by our Match Day results and to welcome such a talented group of interns,” said Maria A. Yialamas, MD, director of the Brigham’s Internal Medicine Residency Program. “We look forward to working with them and learning from them.”

Of this year’s class of internal medicine interns, 52 percent who matched are women and 21 percent are underrepresented in medicine (URIM). Across all Brigham residency programs, 51 percent who matched are women and 26 percent are URIM.

In celebration of Match Day, Brigham Bulletin spoke with four newly matched interns to hear what inspired their paths into medicine.

A heartfelt homecoming

Growing up in Roxbury, Chidinma “Chi-Chi” Osuagwu had long been inspired by health care leaders at the Brigham.

“Seeing the influence and the benefits that the Brigham brings to the community,” as she described it, spurred her to work as a research assistant here for two years with the Heart Failure Equity Project before beginning medical school.

Additionally, while studying public health as an undergraduate, she read the work of Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, co-founder of Partners In Health and chief of the Brigham’s Division of Global Health Equity until his sudden death in 2022. His work and ethos further inspired her to be part of long-term, sustainable change in medicine.

“I wanted to be somewhere where I thought I could really realize my potential and value,” said Osuagwu, who will receive her medical degree from Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine this spring.

Upon learning that she had matched at the Brigham, she shared a simple message on social media: “I’M COMING HOME.”

As she embarks on a career in medicine, Osuagwu hopes her local roots will help her earn the trust of her patients. She is also excited that this homecoming provides an opportunity to continue improving access and affordability to community-based movement and fitness in Boston through the dance company she started in 2017, Afrobeats Dance Boston.

“Knowing we come from those same communities is so important for making community bonds, so patients know we are truly there for them,” she said. “I’m excited to be that representative at the Brigham.”

Her drive to create lasting change comes from witnessing and experiencing firsthand disparities in access to health care that affected her community, family and friends.

“I want to give back to the communities that raised me and gave me my name,” Osuagwu said. “Because I had seen how people did not have access, there was an opportunity to do something and be a part of something bigger for others.”

Osuagwu (center) celebrates her match with loved ones in Philadelphia.

Her parents were also major sources of inspiration to study medicine. “They came here from Nigeria. Their perseverance and selflessness really planted seeds in me,” she said. “They really taught me adaptability and resourcefulness.”

Her father wanted to practice medicine in Nigeria, “but the turmoil in our country made it impossible for him,” she explained. Once their family settled in Roxbury, he started working as a nurse, which gave Osuagwu the opportunity to shadow him at work.

“I fell in love with it,” she said. “I knew I could help people this way. I could work with communities this way.”

During medical school, she had the opportunity to learn about various specialties through her clerkships, but she remained most drawn to internal medicine.

“I learned I wanted to be a patient’s primary clinician, that first point of contact, and build that therapeutic alliance,” she said. Internal medicine felt like the best way to treat patients holistically and advocate on their behalf.

In time, she wants to take that advocacy global: She plans to apply for the Brigham’s Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine, a four-year program that leads to eligibility to become a board-certified physician and the completion of a master’s in public health via the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In addition to rigorous clinical training, Hiatt residents participate in 11 months of field work and research. The program stood out to Osuagwu during the residency application process.

“It’s a beautiful combination of both working in the field and the research. Looking at other programs, they just didn’t hold a candle to the work at the Brigham,” she said. “I want work to alleviate the colonial barriers that are pervasive and still affect health care negatively by building sustainable, independent and empowered care.”

With so many bright opportunities on the horizon, Osuagwu said she is overjoyed to have matched here: “I love the fact that at a place like the Brigham you can really do it all.”

Creating a platform for change

Nolen (center) celebrates with her future Primary Care residency program director, Sonja Solomon (left), MD, and Valerie Stone (right), MD, MPH, vice chair of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Department of Medicine, during the Brigham’s Match Day reception.

LaShyra “Lash” Nolen first discovered her love of science when she won her third-grade science fair.

“I had this epiphany: I like science, and I think I’m pretty good at it,” she recalled.

Ever since, when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always said a doctor. She even started dressing as one for Halloween.

As she got older, that dream held steady but took on a more harrowing lens as Nolen started to notice some of her family members were dying at young ages from preventable illnesses. Her curiosity and determination made her start asking questions.

“Why is it that my aunt, my grandmother — they’re getting these illnesses so young and they’re always sick? This isn’t right,” she remembered thinking.

She took her first public health class in college, where she learned about social determinants of health — a term for non-medical factors in a person’s life, such as their racial identity or even their zip code, which correlate to different health outcomes.

“It was at that point that I knew I didn’t just want to become a doctor and heal the individual. I really wanted to heal society by understanding the systemic inequities that lead to the individual challenges I saw my family facing,” Nolen said.

This realization inspired her life’s calling: to advocate for health equity and social justice on behalf of vulnerable people everywhere as a physician activist.

“I just cried tears of happiness and embraced my mom,” says Nolen, pictured with her mother, Ty Harps, on Match Day.

She will take another step forward in that journey this spring, when she completes a dual-degree program at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Harvard Kennedy School of Government to earn her medical degree and a master’s in public policy. During her time at HMS, Nolen has served as the university’s student council president for her class — the first documented Black woman to hold that position in the school’s 242-year history. Prior to med school, she completed a Fulbright fellowship in Spain and a year of service with AmeriCorps as a health educator in Chicago.

She has also emerged as a national voice in health equity and antiracism in medicine, earning numerous accolades for her activism. In 2021, she founded the grassroots nonprofit We Got Us, a student-led coalition that works to combat racism in Boston by increasing access to equitable health care, community-centered health education and holistic healing.

As she began the residency application process, Nolen realized many of the medical professionals she looked up to the most had trained at the Brigham, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA; internist and health equity leader Michelle Morse, MD, MPH, the first chief medical officer of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; and physician and racial justice advocate Lachelle Dawn Weeks, MD, a hematologist and scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

“But what further interested me as a student is the way the residents were pushing the institution to live up to their values of equity,” Nolen said. “Those folks have a voice and an opportunity to make change.”

As an incoming intern, she looks forward to building a lifelong community with her fellow residents, training to become an excellent clinician and continuing to work in antiracism. Over time, she plans to examine “racism in clinical algorithms and decision-making and biases toward patients of underserved and marginalized identities to combat that in the clinical setting.”

From those early science fairs to Match Day, Nolen has found her drive and purpose from another important and constant source of inspiration: her mother.

“She’s an incredible role model. She had me when she was 18, raised me as a single parent and still went on to get both her bachelor’s and her master’s degrees,” Nolen said.

So, it was only fitting that her mom was by her side when Nolen found out she had matched with her top choice.

“It took me a few seconds to really let it sink in, and then I just cried tears of happiness and embraced my mom,” Nolen said. “It was a culmination of us working together to achieve this dream. It’s an absolute natural fit. It felt like I’m coming home.”

Tissue culture for two, please

From very early in their residency application process, James Hocker and Bethany Fixsen had a good feeling about the Brigham. The couple met in medical school at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where Fixsen worked with Chris Glass, MD, PhD, who had also studied at the Brigham.

“He came back to start his scientific fellowship at UCSD, and he is such a presence — a really amazing researcher and a great mentor to both of us,” Hocker said.

Fixsen also had a close friend who was thrilled with her own experience as an intern at the Brigham. “It was really important for us to see just how happy someone really close to me was feeling at that program,” she said.

So, by December 2023, while discussing their future plans, Fixsen told Hocker, “I think we’re going to Boston. I just feel it in my bones.”

Discovering that premonition came true was unlike any other moment they’ve experienced.

Hocker and Fixsen embrace upon learning they both matched at the Brigham.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recreate it. I immediately jumped up and down and screamed,” Fixsen said of opening her envelope. “We’re so thrilled that it worked out, because it was absolutely our first choice,” Hocker added.

Although the couple met in medical school, their paths could have crossed earlier. They both grew up in the Midwest — Hocker in Wisconsin, Fixsen in Minnesota — and they both spent two years doing research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Together, they’ll be pursuing the Science in Residency Pathway to become physician-scientists, but with different inspirations and goals.

After spending time in the Clinical Center at the NIH and “seeing people get better, right in front of my eyes,” Hocker decided he wanted to do clinical work. But he’s also interested in genomic sequence and, specifically, noncoding variation in the genome.

“I’m interested in how we can use information about patients’ DNA to improve their health care and do better for them,” he said. “I know there are leaders at the Brigham who are doing cutting-edge research in this field, and I hope that I have a little bit of extra interfacing with leaders in that area.”

Fixsen’s research interest has been in macrophages and gene regulation. She looks forward to residency training for the opportunity to focus on “becoming a really excellently trained internist,” with a goal to ultimately have a career in hematology oncology. Her road into medicine started a little closer to home, when she needed surgery for a collapsed lung.

“It was my first interaction with the health care system, and being in that environment seemed really fascinating,” she said. “So, when I went to the University of Chicago, I really homed in on the medical side of things as I was prepping my studies for the next step.”

Both will become the first doctors in their families. “Our families are so excited for us,” Hocker said. “I think they didn’t really know, coming into Match Day, how big of a deal it was until everyone was crying and jumping up and down. They’re over the moon right now.”