Brad Kahl: Background

I'm Brad Kahl; I'm the director of the University of Wisconsin Lymphoma research program. I'm actually from Dane county, I grew up very close to Madison, I went to undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I went out to Boston for medical school, to Tufts University and it was there that I really became interested in hematology and specifically in lymphoma as an area of focus. As a medical student I spent my summers working in a research lab of an investigator at Tufts University, named David Shanghime, and he was a lymphoma specialist, and it was at that time I looked and saw a role model and saw the kind of patients he was taking care of and became very interested in the group of diseases that are lymphoma and had decided that, that's where I wanted to take my career. I moved back to Madison in 1994 to do my internship and residency in Internal Medicine. And after completing that I stayed at the University of Wisconsin as a Hematology fellow, and it was during my fellowship that I really began to hone my interest in lymphomas as an area of clinical care and as an area of research. As I was finishing my fellowship I had to start looking for jobs and I knew I wanted to be a lymphoma expert, a lymphoma specialist. There were lots of opportunities to go lots of places, but there was something about staying here that appealed to me. The lymphoma program at the University of Wisconsin was somewhat underdeveloped at that point and I felt that I could do this; I could take the University of Wisconsin lymphoma research program and put it on par with other lymphoma research programs at other major medical centers around the country. And so for the last 8 years that has been my focus, trying to take the UW lymphoma research program and make it one of the very best in the United States.