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When JABSOM student Elizabeth Rooks stepped away from the classroom for a dedicated research year, she set out to build the skills and experience needed for a career in ophthalmology. Now, her work is gaining national recognition.
Rooks was recently awarded the Research to Prevent Blindness Medical Student Eye Research Fellowship, a highly competitive program that supports medical students advancing the understanding and treatment of eye disease.
“It’s an incredible honor,” Rooks said. “This fellowship feels like an investment in my future, but more importantly in work that directly impacts patients.”
Her research focuses on retinoblastoma, a rare but serious eye cancer that primarily affects young children. “Some patients also go on to develop osteosarcomas or other cancers in their forties and fifties, while others never do,” Rooks said, and her lab aims to uncover why.
Collaborating with researchers at the University of Washington, Rooks studies the genetic mutations that cause retinoblastoma and how they are inherited.
“One of our key questions is why some patients are more vulnerable to additional cancers while others remain unaffected,” Rooks explained.
A major tool in her research is long-read genetic sequencing, a cutting-edge method that allows researchers to determine not just what mutations exist, but which parent passed them on.
“Unlike traditional sequencing methods, long-read sequencing lets us see the parental origin of a mutation without needing to test the parents. This is important because earlier research shows that mutations inherited from the father can make retinoblastoma more aggressive,” she said.
By identifying the parent of origin of a mutation, this approach is helping researchers better understand why retinoblastoma behaves differently from patient to patient. Her lab is investigating the underlying genetic mechanisms behind these differences, work that could eventually point to new therapeutic strategies.
Rooks is also helping bring this research closer to patient care. She helps collect and sequence DNA samples from children with retinoblastoma and works with the team to return genetic findings to the ocular oncologist, potentially informing care in a cancer that can progress quickly. Knowing the parent of origin could help identify high-risk children earlier and allow treatment to be tailored more precisely.
Rooks’ work also includes contributing to inherited retinal disease projects, curating genetic variant databases, and building tools that make it easier to explore links between genotype, phenotype, and inheritance.
After this year of dedicated research, Rooks will return to Hawaiʻi to complete her medical training at JABSOM. “I am so grateful for this fellowship and for my team,” she said. “Working with them has taught me so much and has shown me the kind of physician I want to become.”
Congratulations to Rooks on this exciting recognition, and we look forward to seeing her continued contributions to vision research and patient care.