Student's Bio
Maximilian Garcia is a Senior majoring in Neuroscience and Spanish. He worked with Dr. Dolly Ann Padovani-Claudio and Raymond Zhou to determine the strengths of the associations of various risk factors and comorbidities in patients with diabetes with the initiation and progression of diabetic retinopathy in the VUMC patient population. In the four semesters that he has been a part of the Padovani-Claudio Laboratory for Angiogenic Retinopathies, he has become familiar with using Vanderbilt University’s de-identified health record database, the Synthetic Derivative, to obtain clinical data of patients with diabetes. He has used statistical analysis such as logistic regression and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding to better understand the relationships between collected data with the hope of discovering new associations or providing insight to inconsistencies in ophthalmic literature. After graduating, Max will be taking a gap year before applying to medical school to further pursue his passion for patient care and ophthalmology.