Featured Member

Alyssa Monica Torres Flores, MD

What led you to a career in Vascular Surgery and academic research?

I decided on vascular surgery because I liked the technical precision, variety in skills, and general spirit of innovation in the field. I had a sense I was interested in cardiovascular disease when I began medical school because it’s something that has affected my family, but vascular surgery really caught my interest because we are able to manage the full spectrum of vascular disease – including medical management, catheter-based approaches, and surgery. I was fortunate to go to Dartmouth for medical school because the vascular surgery program there invested time and resources in medical student education and really nurtured my interest.

In terms of academic research, before medical school, I was involved in a drug development project and realized research is a special opportunity to make a positive impact at scale. During medical school, I had two very formative years at Stanford through a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship. I learned a lot about what a “physician-scientist” is during that time. I was lucky to work with cardiologists, vascular medicine specialists, and vascular surgeons who each had research careers and were thinking about problems in vascular disease in innovative ways, namely using unbiased genome-wide and machine learning approaches. After going through my first years of residency at Mass General, I was really excited to get back to the lab because I’ve had very influential experiences, seen complications, and taken care of patients from early to end stage of disease. Research is a way I can try to address existing needs and questions in the understanding and management of vascular disease, especially for the most at-risk populations.

Are there any scientific investigations you are working on that you would like to highlight? Do you want to highlight any specific things about your career?

I study vascular disease in large biobanks that link genetic and longitudinal electronic health data. One central motivating factor for me is extending analyses to populations with diverse ancestries, which we know is important for vascular diseases because ancestries that have been historically underrepresented in research are often the most at-risk populations we see in the hospital. This past year at the AHA, I presented my work developing a multi-ancestry/multi-trait polygenic risk score for PAD that integrates genetic variants discovered from >2 million ancestrally diverse individuals. I am proud of this work because diverse populations are represented and I hope it lays the groundwork for incorporating personalized medicine into vascular care. I would like to thank the Council on PVD for highlighting my work in the 2024 Coffman Young Investigator Award Session!

I think that having a clinical background in vascular surgery, I am able to offer a unique perspective because we are faced with managing acute, life-threatening complications of disease progression. Too often this is the outcome after a patient has a condition that goes years of being undiagnosed or undertreated. My work is geared towards studying information from individuals who have been deeply phenotyped, genotyped, and followed over their lifespan. I am looking forward to learning how to best leverage this rich data to study vascular disease development, progression, and risk through my career.