#53 Travis Benson

Travis Benson is an M1 at Harvard Medical School. Prior to medical school, Travis worked as a pipe welder for nine years. Motivated by the experience of being the child of a transgender parent and seeing the discrimination that the trans community faces in a clinical setting, Travis quit his job in 2015 to return to school to become a physician. He attended the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health and majored in Health Sciences as a non-traditional first-generation student. During undergrad, Travis was heavily involved in research. At OHSU, he conducted research on voice masculinization in transmasculine patients, created a health needs assessment study of the transgender and gender non-conforming community in Portland, and worked as a clinical researcher in a circadian rhythm lab. He also spent some time as a research fellow at the NIH as part of the Amgen Scholars program where he studied immunology. He has been heavily involved in mentoring students. As an undergrad, he founded a chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon at his school and tutored for the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and athletic department. Currently, he serves as a non-resident tutor for Harvard University where he helps pre-med students navigate the application process. Currently, he is involved in phalloplasty research at Boston Children’s Hospital and cutaneous T cell lymphoma research at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. He is part of the Derm Scholars program at HMS. He is one of the co-founders and moderators of the twitter chat, @MedStudentChat. He is interested in transgender health, dermatology, and bioethics, and one day hopes to combine those three interests in his career.