Anna Greka

Well, you know, I actually I would credit my parents.

You mentioned that, you know, my father, they're both physician scientists.

My father is now both retired, but my father is a nephrologist and my mother is a pathologist.

Actually, they were both academics.

And so when we were very young, we lived in England when my parents were doing postdoctoral work.

That was actually a wonderful gift that they gave me because I became bilingual.

It was a very young age.

And so that allowed me to have this advantage of being fluent in English.

And then when we moved back to Greece, where I grew up, I went to an American school.

And from that time, this is actually an interesting story in itself.

I'm very proud of this school.

It's called Anatolia and it was founded by American missionaries from Williams College, you know, a long time ago, 150 and more years ago.

But it is in Thessaloniki, Greece, which is my hometown.

And it's a wonderful institution which gave me a lot of gifts as well, preparing me for, you know, coming to college in the United States.

And, you know, of course, I was a good student in high school, but, you know, what really was catalytic was that I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to go to Harvard.

And that was really the, you know, you could say the catalyst that propelled me from, you know, a teenager who was dreaming about a career as a physician scientist, because I certainly was, you know, for as far back as I remember, in fact.

But then, you know, to make that a reality, you know, I found myself on the Harvard campus initially for college.

And then I was in the combined Harvard-MIT program for my MD-PhD.

And, you know, then I trained in Boston at Mass General in Brigham and then sort of started my academic career.

And that sort of brings us to today.