Wide Open Spaces and Broad Possibilities Drive Mission for Pediatric Research

“I am a generalist at heart looking for the big picture,” said Sara Van Driest, M.D., Ph.D. “I don’t like to close doors.”

Growing up in rural Minnesota, known as the “land of 10,000 lakes,” Sara Van Driest, All of Us’ director of pediatrics, had a broad perspective of the country’s expansive landscape. The fields and farms stretched miles, filling her mind with endless possibilities.

Her parents, Judy and Jerry Lawson, fueled her ambition and enthusiasm, cultivating curiosity, a love of learning, and respect for all people. Her parents still live in the home where Dr. Van Driest grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, along the Mississippi River Valley.

“I’ve had many great mentors in my career,” Dr. Van Driest said. “My parents were the best role models.”

Dr. Van Driest credits her mother with the creativity to imagine possibilities when faced with challenges and seeing the value in multiple perspectives. Her mother was a neonatal intensive care nurse at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center. In the 1980s, and throughout her career, she observed significant advances in the care of preterm babies. No doubt, this sparked Dr. Van Driest’s interest in pediatrics.

“She taught me that we all bring different insights to the table,” Dr. Van Driest said. “Keep an open mind and open ears.”

Her father was an engineer and problem solver who fixed vehicles of all shapes and sizes, many parked on their 10-acre lot. Watching her father fix all sorts of cars and trucks gave her a vision of what could be built and transformed over time.

When she was 13, her dad brought home a broken-down 1962 Nova for her that sat for years. She saw a dilapidated car but knew her father had a plan. Decades later, his plan would carry her to the next chapter of her life.

On her wedding day, in July 1999, her husband Steve surprised her and rolled up in the car. He had secretly replaced the engine and fixed the car with help from her father and her brother, Erik. They rode in the car to their wedding reception and have been driving the car around ever since.

“I am a big believer that it is as much about the journey as the destination,” Dr. Van Driest said. “I love learning how to get around in different ways.” For Dr. Van Driest, that’s not just talk. In addition to a driver’s license, she has a motorcycle license and a pilot’s license, and is a certified forklift operator to boot. Her journey from rural Minnesota to All of Us has been as varied as her modes of transportation.

A Path to Medicine

As a high school student, she remembers telling her parents she didn’t want to become a doctor, a teacher, or a researcher. Now having become all three, she looks back and attributes her comment to wanting to contribute in multiple ways.

“I am a generalist at heart looking for the big picture,” Dr. Van Driest said. “I don’t like to close doors.”

Dr. Van Driest graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1998. She chose a liberal arts degree rather than a Bachelor of Science, which would have been a more typical choice for students pursuing medical school. The Bachelor of Arts degree allowed her to broaden her studies, learning French, abstract mathematics, and even a course on modern art.

The Mayo Clinic College of Medicine sparked a deeper interest in research, science, and medicine. At Mayo, she learned more about DNA, the code unique to each person, and how traits are passed on through the generations. She learned about drug metabolism and how individuals process medications differently based on their genes. The more she learned, the more she wanted to explore and discover. Just like with the ’62 Nova, she could see a bigger plan emerging.

Her dissertation focused on a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, where the heart thickens and has a harder time pumping blood.

“The prevailing opinion was that if you could identify the variant in the DNA causing a person’s disease, it would tell you everything you needed to know,” Dr. Van Driest said. “But I found that it wasn’t that simple. Some people have more significant symptoms and side effects. You have to understand the various influences that impact health. It’s not just the variant.”

By 2006, she had earned both her medical and doctoral degrees. She went on to complete her residency in pediatrics, a clinical pharmacology fellowship, and developed a career as a physician-scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Throughout this time, Dr. Van Driest has written and co-authored more than 100 research papers.

After 20 years of seeing patients, she found herself asking, “How can we avoid the trial and error approach to treatments? How can we prevent severe reactions, what are the triggers? I wanted to understand it better.”

A Passion for All of Us

In medical school, Dr. Van Driest was drawn to pediatrics, wanting to better understand disease progression through the lifespan. This focus also fueled her passion to join All of Us. When publishing pediatric research papers, she often had to include a disclaimer that the paper needed to be validated with a larger database.

That large pediatric database does not yet exist, but with Dr. Van Driest’s leadership, the program has taken the first steps to build it. All of Us recently announced limited enrollment of children from birth through age 4, at five partner organizations to start.

“One of my goals as director of pediatrics at All of Us is to build a large, diverse, inclusive database so that researchers won’t have to write that disclaimer and our families won’t have to tolerate the unknowns that come with trial and error,” Dr. Van Driest said. “We want to foster studies across pediatric disciplines that can improve health for kids of all backgrounds.”

Recently, Dr. Van Driest returned to her Minnesota roots, moving from Nashville to Saint Paul to be closer to her parents and extended family.

“Tennessee will always be a special place to me. It is where I started my career, and it is where Steve and I raised our daughters,” Dr. Van Driest said. “But it’s great to be closer to home.”

Leading pediatric enrollment at All of Us, Dr. Van Driest envisions a future where wide-ranging research discoveries can improve treatment, diagnosis, and prevention for children and families across the lifespan.

“We need to keep expanding our horizons,” Dr. Van Driest said. “But I’ve always had a translational perspective, which I attribute to my dad and mom,” she added. “I do absolutely believe that we need people who are doing research simply for the love of knowledge and to generate new ideas, but the way my brain works, I need to see a path as to how this is going to help all of us.”