Straight out of high school, Caleb Holder was drafted as a goalie for the Massachusetts Maple Leafs, a hockey team in Boston. After suffering a severe hip injury that nearly left him unable to walk, Holder was taken off the roster, no longer able to play.
After a successful corrective surgery, he began researching the surgery techniques and decided that medicine was going to be his career.
“Going through high school, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer,” said the Missouri State University senior. “I was really good at math and science — it just came naturally to me. I started considering a career in medicine when I was playing hockey and I had to start thinking about my hip.”
Once he enrolled at Missouri State, he dove into getting as much experience as possible in the medical field. He volunteered at Cox North, becoming an emergency room tech, and then a scribe at Mercy Hospital.
“It’s great exposure. It teaches an undergraduate to not only work with a doctor, but to think like a doctor,” Holder said. “Plus, shadowing is almost required to get into medical school.”
In July 2013, Amanda Brodeur, biomedical sciences assistant professor, recruited Holder for a research project on Hurler’s syndrome. It’s a genetic disease in children, which is often fatal by age 10 or 12. Brodeur, Holder and other research assistants in the lab are working to further characterize the disease to allow for earlier diagnosis and prevention.
“It causes a buildup of sulphates in the body and leads to organ failure,” he said. “So we’re trying to characterize the phenotypes of the disease so that we can provide preventative medicine to make the children’s lives better and longer.”
Holder also has served as a research assistant on a project to develop an innovative way to screen for and diagnose pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots on the lungs.
“With this method, we hope to be able to closely follow the lives of patients with vascular disease and diabetes.”
Story by Nicki Donnelson, MSU’s public relations specialist