In the early aughts, when anesthesiologist Dr. Gunisha Kaur, M.D. ’10, was a medical student at Weill Cornell Medicine, she sought to help immigrants who were seeking refuge in the United States after experiencing persecution or torture in their home countries. It’s a passion drawn from a profoundly personal experience: As a daughter of Indian immigrants and an immigrant herself, she wanted to find a way to help people like her father, a Sikh who had been beaten by a mob in India and left for dead. Unfortunately, there was no forensic evaluation clinic to document asylum seekers’ injuries at Weill Cornell at the time.

As cancer therapies improve and increasingly achieve cures or recurring periods of remission, preventing and managing damage to organs from cancer treatment has become a top concern. That includes injury to the heart, says Joerg Herrmann, M.D., a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Cardio-Oncology Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.