At noon on Friday, March 15, Alysia Bryll and her classmates in the T.H. Chan School of Medicine Class of 2024 will simultaneously tear open their envelopes from the National Resident Matching Program to discover where they will begin their careers in medicine.
“UMass Chan has given me the tools that I need to leave here and do anything I really want to in terms of research or clinical medicine in pathology,” said Bryll, who is looking to match in pathology. “I have been given so many opportunities here and I’m very prepared to do what I would like to do in the future.”
The National Resident Matching Program administers Match Day, the annual, nationwide pairing of graduating medical students with postgraduate residency training programs. Matches are made through a complex algorithm that incorporates the preferences of both the students and residency programs. By design, matches remain secret until noon on the third Friday of March every year.
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At UMass Chan, the Match Day ceremony starts at 11:15 a.m. in the Medical School lobby. More than 160 graduating medical students and their families and friends will gather for the special event. Bryll is one of nine graduating MD/PhD candidates taking part.
“I am interested in pathology for its essential role in patient care, opportunities for research and extensive use of problem solving,” she said, explaining that it was her late father’s struggle with acute myeloid leukemia that inspired her to consider the field.
Mitchell Bryll Jr. died in 2007, following a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, a condition that occurs when abnormal blood cells in bone marrow are present, which progressed to acute myeloid leukemia.
“I always felt pathology reports provided relief and a sense of certainty as these results helped direct the next steps in clinical treatment of my father’s illness,” she said. “I feel that pathology is one field of medicine where basic science advancements can be applied to improving diagnostics and patient care.”
At Mount Holyoke College, the Springfield native majored in biological sciences and pursued research with an emphasis on understanding how mutations in various molecular pathways lead to disease. Later, working as a research technician at Boston University, she assisted on a project identifying potential biomarkers in a subset of tumor cells. She said the work revealed a personal need to connect her research to patient care.
Bryll completed her PhD in 2022 in the lab of Craig L. Peterson, PhD, professor of molecular medicine, where she performed sequencing experiments to identify the mechanism that regulates global RNA transcription and better understand chromatin dynamics.
UMass Chan will livestream the Match Day ceremony on Facebook and YouTube, starting at 11:15 a.m. on Friday. Visit UMass Chan News, Facebook, Instagram and X for additional coverage.
