Working at UAB and Children’s of Alabama inspired Isaac Martinez to pursue a career in medicine.
Not long after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota in 2018, Isaac Martinez realized his original career plans were no longer the right fit. For some, this might have been an obstacle; for Martinez, it became an opportunity.
Martinez, who graduated with a degree in chemistry, had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in the same field at the University of Delaware. But after finishing his undergraduate studies, he came to see that it would not make him happy. “I kind of took a step back and realized that I’m just doing this to do it,” he said. “I don’t really have a reason as to why I’m getting a Ph.D. in this field specifically.”
So he took some time off and applied for a job as a clinical research coordinator in the Institute for Cancer Outcomes and Survivorship (ICOS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Children’s of Alabama. He now says it’s the best decision he’s ever made.
ICOS was founded in 2015 to meet the needs of the growing population of cancer survivors. The program’s mission is to reduce the burden of cancer and its sequelae across all segments of the population through interdisciplinary research, health promotion and education—thus giving cancer survivors the chance at long, healthy lives. At the time Martinez applied, Emily Johnston, M.D., MS, a pediatric oncologist and Carleton College alum, had just moved to Birmingham to join ICOS, where she was working to improve end-of-life care for children with cancer and other complex medical conditions. Martinez was her first hire. Over the next seven years, he would interview more than 100 bereaved parents, asking them about their experience with end-of-life care. “At first, it was really overwhelming,” Martinez said. “But you quickly realize the need.”
There has been a growing understanding that palliative care for children with cancer is critically important. But there are barriers to expanding pediatric palliative care access—not only at UAB and Children’s, but across the country. Although palliative care’s goal is to alleviate suffering—physical, spiritual, emotional and psychosocial—there are some who think palliative care is only about end-of-life care. But Martinez, Johnston and others helped children with high-risk brain tumors at Children’s get palliative care at the time of diagnosis. Martinez interviewed providers and parents about their experiences, which were almost universally positive. This led to early palliative care programs for children with solid tumors.
Additionally, improving end-of-life care for children has been limited by hesitation about doing research with bereaved parents. “I think that it’s hard to talk about those things,” Martinez said. “It’s hard to do research in those areas. There’s a lot of hesitancy about involving parents in this type of research because of bringing up an emotional subject matter. But it turns out that parents are interested in participating, and they want this research to be done. And for a lot of those parents, it’s a way to ensure that their child’s legacy lives on. It’s a way to process what happened.”
The team’s work helped them develop the first end-of-life quality measures for children with cancer and led to the publication of their findings. For Martinez, contributing to this process was “like nothing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. And it changed the trajectory of his career. Instead of pursuing a Ph.D., he decided to pursue an M.D. He now wants to become a physician so he can help more families like the ones he interviewed. In the fall of 2025, he enrolled in the Heersink School of Medicine at UAB.
“I think [these experiences] were a huge motivator for me to apply to medical school and eventually become a physician and care for these families,” he said.
For Martinez, the overarching goal is to help others, which he already was doing even before he started medical school. And ICOS played a role in that, too. In the early part of 2025, a former oncology nurse in the ICOS Survivorship Clinic told him about bone marrow donation. “As I did more research, I realized that most Hispanic patients don’t get matched because there’s not enough people registered to be donors for those matches to be made.”
So he signed up to donate and was matched with a patient who needed a bone marrow transplant within just a few months—much faster than the typical match. “That speaks to the need of Hispanic donors,” Martinez said. “That speaks to how often these donors are needed.”
Helping minority communities is a key reason Martinez wants to go into medicine. This desire came into focus during his time at ICOS when he also served as a part-time interpreter at Children’s. Translating for Hispanic patients revealed to him the need for Hispanic physicians. “I saw the faces change as soon as I entered the room,” he said. “I saw the special interactions that I had with some of these patients. That planted a seed in me during those first couple of years. As I got to experience more of what medicine actually is and what physicians do, I quickly realized that’s what I wanted to do.”
While he’s not sure what specialty he’ll pursue, palliative care and oncology are “the obvious choice” since they fit his passion. But he’s keeping an open mind. “In medicine, I don’t think that I can make the wrong choice,” he said. “Bottom line, I want to help patients, I want to work with families, and I want to practice medicine. As long as I can fulfill those three categories, whether it’s oncology or palliative care or psychiatry or emergency medicine—which are kind of the things that I’m leaning towards—I would be happy.”
Whatever direction he goes, his path to becoming a physician began here at Children’s and UAB, where he discovered that his happiness is found in helping others.
