Meet Julia Warren, MD, PhD
Julia T. Warren, MD, PhD, joined Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in fall 2022. She is a hematologist with the Division of Hematology and the Pediatric Comprehensive Bone Marrow Failure Program. Recently, she took some time to answer questions about her professional and personal life.
Q: What drew you to medicine as a career?
A: I came to medicine through advocacy work I was doing in college to support women’s rights. At the same time, I was doing research in a basic science lab. I realized that I loved science and was passionate about it, but the way it impacts people’s lives is over decades. Doing work where you’re directly interfacing with patients allows you to help someone who is in need in the moment, and that appealed to me.
Q: Why pediatrics?
A: Kids are a delight to work with, and it’s a pleasure to see kids go through all their stages of development. I also get to see kids who are figuring out how to be sneaky or have a sense of humor, or teenagers who are figuring out how to transition to adulthood. How you do an exam and how you ask questions changes with every patient, so it makes each visit more interesting and a more satisfying challenge.
Q: What excited you about the field of hematology?
A: You know you’re in the right field when you don’t understand why everyone else doesn’t want to be in this field! Sometimes we take care of blood issues that can impact children for their entire life, and so we get to build meaningful long-term relationships with the child and their families. Sometimes we get to take care of a problem that’s temporary and will go away — it’s also a great feeling to tell someone that they have one less doctor they need to see. We have new medications becoming available all the time, and it’s really such an active area for research, drug discovery and new technologies like gene therapy.
Q: Can you tell us about your research?
A: My research laboratory studies how we form blood cell, a process called “hematopoiesis.” When this goes awry, patients cannot make enough blood cells and experience something called bone marrow failure. Understanding the basic biology of how we normally make blood components can help us develop new diagnostic tests and treatments for when the process goes wrong. Right now, we are focusing on understanding several genes that are found in patients with a particular type of bone marrow failure that causes severely low neutrophil numbers. These are critical infection-fighting cells, and we hope to better understand how these gene changes impact survival of neutrophils. I also help run a clinical trial for patients with long-standing low neutrophil counts (neutropenia), asking if a new type of medication that can be taken by mouth can help them have normal neutrophil numbers.
Q: Who is someone you looked up to as a child?
A: My piano teacher Capitola Dickerson was an amazing human being. She was a wonderful teacher, but she was also someone who advocated for equal housing rights. She was denied access to certain music schools because of the color of her skin — she took that experience and decided to help other people so they weren’t in the same position. She just had this way of helping you understand what it was like for other people to move through the world, the difficulties they can face, and overcoming your own difficulties. Every lesson was never just about the piano.
Q: Who have been some of your mentors?
A: The very first science laboratory that I was in, my mentor, Laurens Mets, was just so passionate about science and about training the next generation. Then I worked for an incredible guy, Wei-Jen Tang, in a crystallography lab at the University of Chicago. He inspired students to think about a career in science. My PhD mentor, Steve Teitlelbaum, taught me that “the data are the data,” which is such an important way to approach scientific discovery. We never go in assuming what the answer is going to be. I had a fantastic post-doctoral research mentor, Dan Link, who really helped me become the scientist I am today, and an incredible clinical mentor, Dave Wilson, who is so passionate about bone marrow failure and cancer predisposition.
These were all great mentors, but I wish there were some women in there! I’m hoping to change that for future women in science and medicine. It’s important to me to serve as a role model for other young people who want to pursue a career as a physician-scientist. At CHOP I see a lot of incredible women in leadership, both in the clinical space and the research side, and that was a compelling aspect of CHOP that brought me here.
Q: What do you do in your spare time?
A: I love to play music — I play piano, oboe and guitar. I enjoy gardening and spending time with my husband, Bob. We have a dog, Walter, a cockapoo. And I have a flock of chickens. They’re such a delight. When things get complicated in your life, you can walk up to the chicken coop, and there they are, scratching around, happy as they can be, and laying beautiful and delicious eggs. My current flock is only six girls, but I’m adding 15 more. Don’t tell my husband!
Q: If you could have a superpower, what would you choose?
A: I would like to need zero hours of sleep. Actually, a cool superpower would be being able to tell someone’s absolute neutrophil count by just looking at them. We’ve got to poke these kids a lot. It would be great to not have to do that.