Hunter Lau

I am currently a first year emergency medicine resident physician in Rochester NY. For those not in the United States, that means I have already graduated medical school and am now pursuing my specialty training in emergency medicine. I am one of the group leaders of the EA-Med group leaders, and am working towards bringing the evidence based lens of Effective Altruism to those in medicine/healthcare/life-science research. Hobbies include rock climbing, meditating, reading, and video games.

I initially heard about EA through the Making Sense podcast early in medical school. I always thought it was a cool idea, but it wasn’t until a few years later as medical school was finishing and I had to decide what specialty to pursue that I really started to learn about EA.

Probably like most people, medicine appealed to me because it was a field where you get to use science to help people, you have a leadership position, and your earnings and expertise give you a certain amount of career flexibility which I liked.

I think that your personal fit (your unique skills, position, and situation) are extremely important when making career decisions. There are various effective career pathways that are described on the EA-Med website and on 80,000 hours such as AI research, getting a PhD in Biomedical research, etc. These pathways are great ways to increase your impact if you can pursue them, but in reality a good number of people can’t/won’t pursue these fields for various reasons. My advice would be to be creative, recognizing that not every particular effective career pathway has been scripted and written about yet. Continue to view your career decisions through an EA lens, knowing that your personal fit is a huge factor. At the same time, I would recommend being continually critical of your decisions and self-reflect along the way. It is a natural human tendency to follow the path of least resistance and to do what feels good, and it’s important to be critical of your own work and your own decisions to ensure that they are in line with your EA goals and mindset.

See answer above

We’re hoping to bring a wide range of perspectives to EA-Med. The EA-Med group is meant to be broad and encapsulate all those who are even somewhat in close proximity to the fields of medicine, research, and public health. I think it would be valuable for the EA-Med community to see various ‘success stories’ and to illustrate the numerous ways to have an impact in these various fields, in hopes of inspiring others in the community to have an impact in ways they might not have otherwise.