Espen Fenstad
2025 Scholarship Winner
Yale University – Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (Pre-Med)
There are a handful of people for whom I am eternally grateful. My mother, who is the embodiment of strength and selflessness; my grandparents, whose compassion and empathy never runs dry; my younger brother, for his charisma and playfulness; and a doctor named Mike DiGiovanna. Dr. Digiovanna, M.D., Ph.D. of Yale New Haven Hospital, along with innumerable other physicians and healthcare professionals, gave my mother a second chance at life, ushering her through two clinical trials that have kept her thriving through today. Until my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I wasn’t aware that such heroes walked among us—but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. It is, after all, only on the darkest nights that the stars shine the brightest.
The buzz of a phone interrupted the quiet breakfast café. My mother took the call, and minutes later, delivered to us the tearful news: she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. For a kid in fourth grade, it was impossible to know how to react. Ever since she had discovered the lump, ever since the biopsy wound had caused her pain on our family vacation, ever since the atmosphere had tensed, I had suspected the worst. The news dealt a crushing blow, all the more difficult to bear because I had seen the swing of the axe before feeling the terrible thud. Who was I to tell? At school, I could not bring myself to say that my mother might be dying, nor that I had spent every afternoon of the last three weeks in the cancer ward at the hospital, nor that my parents were now getting a divorce. How could someone so young put words to these feelings? I felt adrift; lost, my world upended and with no compass to point me home.
Now, almost eight years on from my mother’s diagnosis, I look back on the Little Pink Houses of Hope retreat in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 2019 as the time in which I began to feel hopeful again. It was a profound opportunity not only because of what it represented for my mother—a manifestation of how far from a hospital bed she had come—but because of the empowerment I felt. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by a community of survivors and their families. I could look from one face to the next and see the abundance of joy and the wealth of experiences despite everything the terrible disease had taken away. I saw a mindset which I had lacked before, an outlook which saw the sun rise upon the boundless Atlantic and a brighter future. With newfound strength and optimism, I turned to the life-saving work of oncologists like Dr. Digiovanna for inspiration. I have always been fascinated by science—excelling in AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and a brief laboratory summer program at Quinnipiac University—and the opportunity to merge this passion with the amelioration of cancer patients’ suffering made this career choice incredibly meaningful on a personal level. In the summer of 2024, as an intern in the laboratory of Dr. Bindra, M.D., Ph.D. in the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Therapeutic Radiology, I worked alongside prominent researchers to target pediatric glioblastomas and various other cancers by exploiting tumor-specific DNA damage repair deficiencies. Only just across the street from Yale New Haven Hospital, where my mother was treated, it was easy to see that research like this is the reason my mother is here today.
As an admitted student to the Yale University Class of 2029, I am incredibly excited to continue this impactful research with the Bindra lab in the years ahead. I desire to become a physician-scientist like the heroic Dr. Digiovanna and Dr. Bindra, targeting the deadly disease with groundbreaking therapies. It is amazing to see how far the field of oncology has already come: my grandmother, who attended the retreat with us, was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Only years after my mother was diagnosed, new treatments were already available to my grandmother which vastly benefited her prognosis. As a physician-scientist in the field of oncology, my work will mean that others will not have to endure what my mother did: immense nausea, pain, stress, and countless other effects of the years-long regimen of chemotherapy, injections, infusions, and radiation. The hope and courage that defined the Little Pink Houses of Hope retreat for my family will find a place in more patients’ lives.