A Competitive Runner on the Clinical Research Track

From age of 10, when Dr. Flowers began competing in track and field, running has been his passion. Growing up in Seattle, he and his brother competed in local, regional, and national championships and his family made a yearly pilgrimage to the mecca of track and field at Hayward Field at the University of Oregon. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he competed in the 400-meter hurdles and then leveraged his intensive focus to study human biology.

He remained at Stanford as a medical student and continued work with Dr. Kenneth Melmon to investigate the groundbreaking research of Nobel Prize recipients Getrude Elion and George Hitchings involving the translation findings from cellular and animal models to clinically useful drugs including the 6-MP, allopurinol, azathioprine, and AZT. “Although these scientists made the enabling observations for each of these drugs, my research uncovered a series of physicians who served as ‘clinical champions’, and who dramatically sped the process of drug development. It produced a chapter in the 1999 book Pharmaceutical Innovation and a manuscript published in Nature Medicine,” he recalls. Over the following years he trained at Stanford’s Division of Clinical Pharmacology and completed a degree in medical informatics to gain expertise in developing information systems to improve clinical trials research. He completed a second master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy and fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington during the time he trained in hematology and oncology.

From age of 10, when Dr. Flowers began competing in track and field, running has been his passion. Growing up in Seattle, he and his brother competed in local, regional, and national championships and his family made a yearly pilgrimage to the mecca of track and field at Hayward Field at the University of Oregon. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he competed in the 400-meter hurdles and then leveraged his intensive focus to study human biology.

He remained at Stanford as a medical student and continued work with Dr. Kenneth Melmon to investigate the groundbreaking research of Nobel Prize recipients Getrude Elion and George Hitchings involving the translation findings from cellular and animal models to clinically useful drugs including the 6-MP, allopurinol, azathioprine, and AZT. “Although these scientists made the enabling observations for each of these drugs, my research uncovered a series of physicians who served as ‘clinical champions’, and who dramatically sped the process of drug development. It produced a chapter in the 1999 book Pharmaceutical Innovation and a manuscript published in Nature Medicine,” he recalls. Over the following years he trained at Stanford’s Division of Clinical Pharmacology and completed a degree in medical informatics to gain expertise in developing information systems to improve clinical trials research. He completed a second master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy and fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington during the time he trained in hematology and oncology.