Ashley Adamo

Ashley Adamo graduated from Hunter College with a degree in literature (favorite author: John Irving), before returning for a postbac in bio-chemistry. She found an unlikely link between her two passions: “All medicine is language,” she said. “Reading a medical textbook is like reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. You read it and then later you understand it.” Part of her desire to attend medical school came from her reflecting on her mother’s death when Adamo was a teenager. “My mother died of cancer and doctors were both the heroes and the villains,” Adamo recalled. “I was angry for a while and then I realized that they were the main players and I was on the side and I never wanted to be on the side again.” Plus, she added with a laugh, being a doctor is good in case of a zombie apocalypse. Between finishing her postbac she worked at a lab studying the effect of various cancers on fruit flies.