By Deborah Wormser

Dr. Jeff SoRelle

Dr. Jeff SoRelle, the first in his family to earn a medical degree, always thought he wanted to be a doctor. As an undergraduate studying abroad to improve his Spanish, he had an experience at a community clinic that profoundly influenced his career path.

“We were performing physicals on schoolchildren, and one girl expressed some concern about blood from her private parts. I called the doctor over to talk to her and I was so impressed at the reassurance he gave her by explaining what was going on with her.

“I realized that I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives the same way this doctor did,” Dr. SoRelle recalled.

The Waco native attended Centre College, a small, liberal arts school in Danville, Kentucky, on a Presidential Scholarship, the school’s highest merit-based award. Selected for the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society, he graduated magna cum laude and received the school’s Organic Chemistry Award.

The same focus and dedication to deeply understanding everything he studies have resulted in Dr. SoRelle’s selection as the 2016 recipient of the Vernie A. Stembridge, M.D., Scholarship Award in Pathology. The award was established by friends and colleagues of Dr. Stembridge, the former Pathology Chair who died in 2000. The $1,500 award is given to the most outstanding graduating medical student whose performance in the sophomore pathology course was exemplary and who is interested in a pathology career.

UT Southwestern was his first choice for medical school for very practical reasons. “It is the best medical school in Texas. The quality of education is on par with top private schools across the country, but the others cannot compete with the price,” he said.

He began to collect accolades soon after arriving at UT Southwestern. As a freshman, he won the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society’s award for student research. He used the award for a summer in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Bruce Beutler, Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense.

Posters based on his research won awards in both the 50th and 51st UT Southwestern Medical Student Research Forums. Next came his selection as one of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s 2014-2015 Medical Research Fellows, which enabled him to return to the Beutler laboratory for a full year.

He said his experience in the Beutler lab changed him.

“I learned so much about what could be accomplished by looking at the fundamental aspects of disease and the importance of approaching these problems in an unbiased manner so that we can be sure that what we report is true,” Dr. SoRelle said.

“Jeff is a fantastically bright and self-motivated student: the type that comes to me with ideas of his own. He has made great progress in a screen of his own design, in which we are probing the genetic basis of allergies. No doubt some of his discoveries will change clinical concepts in the field,” said Dr. Beutler, Professor of Immunology, and a Regental Professor.

Dr. SoRelle, who made time to serve as co-President of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and as co-President of the Gender Equality Medical Society (GEMS) while a medical student, will continue his training with a pathology residency at UT Southwestern.

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Dr. Beutler holds the Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research, in Honor of Laverne and Raymond Willie, Sr.