When Life and Learning Align

For Dominique Davis ’25, cancer care is both personal and professional.

Dominique Davis BS ’25 has wanted to help people from an early age. Her father, a Massachusetts state trooper, and her mother, a high school nurse, modeled a life of service. American pop culture may have played a small role, too.

“I was always a Grey’s Anatomy girl,” she says, smiling. “Now I’m living that dream.”

Since graduating in May 2025 from the Radiation Therapy-Fast Track program in the School of Medical Imaging and Therapeutics (SMIT), Davis has joined the radiation imaging team at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. The hospital—whose Longwood campus is just steps from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences campus in Boston—employs nearly 450 MCPHS graduates, the most of any hospital group. Nearly 100 of those are SMIT grads.

Although she’s the newest team member, Davis brings a mature perspective to her work: every patient is somebody to somebody. It’s a sympathetic mindset gained when her dad, Lionel, was struck with prostate cancer.

A Personal Connection to Care

It was near the end of Davis’s senior fall semester when her father received his diagnosis. They didn’t know it at the time, but fate would soon place father and daughter at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in tandem—one undergoing radiation treatment, the other beginning radiation therapy training.

“The staff knew me before I even got to clinic,” she says, laughing. “My dad was telling everyone, ‘My daughter is going to be coming through here.’ He was networking for me before I even got there.”

She credits the Brigham & Women’s team with creating a compassionate support system for her entire family. Fellow MCPHS grads Erica Pusateri ’23, Corey Valentine ’24, and Michaela Ng ’19 shepherded both her skillset and her spirit. They encouraged her to visit her father during his treatments and talk with his specialists to better understand his protocol.

His last day of therapy was a shared celebration.

“They made a sign that said ‘Happy Last Day, Dad,” and my whole family came in to ring the bell and take pictures,” she says. “The whole experience really fueled my passion for the field and inspired me to be the best at what I do.

“It also really put things into perspective for me. It’s not just my dad going through this; it could be someone else’s dad. It’s not just somebody; it’s somebody’s somebody.”

Lionel completed his treatments in May and is now in remission.

A New Direction, Close to Home

Ironically, medical imaging wasn’t part of Davis’s original plan. She began her college career on a pre-med track in New Orleans, Louisiana. When the COVID-19 pandemic moved all learning online, she stepped away from the disappointment and discomfort to work, travel, and reevaluate her goals.

When she was ready for a return to the classroom, Davis set her sights just 30 miles north of home, on Boston. She was drawn to MCPHS in particular for its wide variety of health-centered programs.

“What really piqued my interest was SMIT,” she remembers. “I had never heard of radiation therapy until I saw it on the website, so I decided to do some research. I felt like it would allow me to develop a relationship with my patients.”

Hands-on experience during her clinical rotations at Brigham & Women’s sealed her choice. Today, her professional life centers on stereotactic radiosurgery cases with a Varian True Beam Edge, also known as “the yellow machine.” Much of her work involves delivering high-dose, single-delivery radiation to the brain, spine, and rib extremities.

“I’m loving it,” she shares. “I want to show the same compassion, empathy, and sympathy to my patients that was shown to my dad.”

Advocating for Equity in Care

Her passion for the field helped Davis earn the Lois Marie Rhodes Scholarship from MCPHS. In her application, she wrote eloquently about her goal of improving equity in healthcare, particularly for black men like her father.

“While in school, I learned that African American men are at a disadvantage when it comes to prostate cancer,” she explained. “They are more likely to be diagnosed at a later stage and with a more aggressive form of the disease than white men. A lot of my dad’s uncles and family members didn’t even know that PSA [prostate-specific antigen] testing was something they should look into as 60-year-old men.”

The disparity has nationwide attention. The National Institutes of Health has published numerous studies exploring the issue and its root causes, including biological, social, environmental, and systemic. The risk is sobering: Black men have more than twice the risk of dying from prostate cancer compared to other racial groups.

“I hope to be an advocate not only for men of color in my life,” Davis says, “but for all men encountering prostate cancer. I have started educating the men of color in my community on the importance of screening and early detection.”