Dr. Elizabeth (Liza) Franco, came to medicine through music. Her background as a competitive pianist drew her attention to neuroscience, especially the connections between the brain and music and the possibilities of music therapy.
Now Chief Resident for the Neurology Department (2020-2021), Dr. Franco reflects on the path that led her to neurology, life as chief resident in the era of COVID-19, and why Vanderbilt is such a good fit for her, her husband, and their 10 month old Australian Labradoodle, Mo.
Tell us about your background.
I was born in Toledo, Ohio, and moved to Coral Springs, Florida when I was 8 years old, so I spent most of my childhood there. I have a younger sister, Sophia, and we are best friends!
Initially I was a musician. I started playing piano when I was three years old and played competitive classical piano for a long time. When I was in high school, I played multiple instruments and started my own teaching studio. In the meantime, I read neuroscience books for fun. I felt like it was the final frontier of medicine.
What inspired your path to medicine?
I attended college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and I went there because it had great programs in both music and neuroscience. I double majored in Neuroscience and Behavior and Psychology with a concentration in Cognition. I continued playing music through college, and started a therapeutic music program for Alzheimer’s patients. The interesting thing about music is that it doesn’t localize to one place of the brain; it hijacks other pathways. So when you play music from a certain era for Alzheimer’s patients, it activates a memory network, and can bring people back to themselves and help them remember people or events from that time. It’s really rewarding.
During college I debated between pursuing a PhD or a MD. I ended up going to medical school [Stony Brook School of Medicine] because I realized I loved talking to people.
Why did you choose to do your residency at Vanderbilt?
I did a rotation here during medical school and fell in love with the people. I could just feel the passion they had and everyone just seemed to get along really well. It felt right.
What do your responsibilities as chief resident look like? Have you had to face any special challenges in recent months?
My job is to make sure the residency program is a well-oiled machine. I’m an emotional support for a lot of residents too, whenever they have issues during rotation. Vanderbilt’s neurology residency is a wonderfully social program, and everyone is great friends. In fact, one of the challenges with COVID is that all the social interaction we were used to is gone. So we’ve had to try to find ways to keep that environment and do outings that are more socially distant like kayaking or Zoom happy hours. I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job, but it is challenging to interact like we did before.
What are your plans for the future?
You aren’t exposed to inpatient neurology until you’re in a residency program. Once I got that exposure, the pace of work appealed to me, so [upon graduation] I’m going to be starting as a Neurohospitalist at Sumner Regional Medical Center in Gallatin. I’ll be the first neurohospitalist there, so I’m very excited that I will have a hand in creating that program. It’s amazing that I’ll have the confidence straight out of residency to do something like that, and Vanderbilt definitely helped support that decision.
Aside from work, eventually, when travel restrictions are lifted, my husband and I would like to go back to Greece. My mom was born in Athens and every year growing up we went to Greece. So we are looking forward to when we can go back and reconnect.
What advice would you give to incoming or first-year residents?
Nurture the relationships you have with your co-residents and your family through residency. My co-residents have become some of my closest friends, and I can’t imagine going through this without all of their support. I try to remind myself that the difficult days in the hospital are the days you learn the most. If you remember that it helps you not only to get through it, but you can take a step back and learn from everything going on.
How do you like to spend your time when you're not on call?
My husband and I are homesteaders. We have a pretty large vegetable garden, and four egg-laying chickens. We try to grow and eat everything we can out of our backyard. I brew my own kombucha, and make my own sourdough bread; I grind my own spices and can tomatoes. I think there’s something pretty amazing about putting a seed in the ground and watching it grow into something you can use. Eventually we’d like to get some more land and have sheep—that’s the big goal. We’d also like to get bees and more chickens. We like to call ourselves Franco Farms.
We love cooking—we cook every night. I’m Greek and my husband is Jewish, so between the two of us we have so many amazing cultural dishes. And before COVID we liked trying all kinds of new restaurants, listening to concerts, and enjoying everything Nashville has to offer.
Anything else you’d like to add?
My husband and I got married in the chapel at the hospital! Long story short, we needed an official person to marry us, and the chaplains at Vanderbilt came through at the last minute. Several people from the Neurology Department came to the ceremony during their lunch break!
