NAC Masters: Getting to Know Mary Ellen Koran

NAC Masters

Getting to Know Mary Ellen Koran

How/When did you start swimming?

I started swimming competitively when I was about seven even though I feared the water.  We lived on a river community in Annapolis, Maryland. At our summer camp, there were weekly swim meets in the brown, murky Severn River. I was terrified to swim in it. I finally agreed to swim in a meet but wanted one of the counselors to tread water in front of me. So, he jumped in in front of me, the whistle was blown, I dove in, and I swam right past him! So, my mom signed me up to be on the Naval Academy Aquatic Club.

I swam there until high school (including at the state meet where a 13-year-old Michael Phelps beat all the 18-year-olds in the open 400 IM!). My high school didn't have a swim team, and I was starting to be less interested in swimming, so I started playing field hockey and tennis instead. My parents retired, and we moved down to Florida my junior year of high school. There was no field hockey, but they did have a swim team! So, I dove back in.

I made States both years and Junior Nationals.  I got really burned out during my senior year and decided to take another break from swimming and not pursue it in college. I took it back up casually during my senior year of undergrad at Duke, and then got back into it at the end of my MD/PhD at Vanderbilt. I swam with Ashley's stepbrother (who was in my MD/PhD program) and his wife; they’re both incredibly fast swimmers. We trained together for Masters' Nationals —he's a sprinter so we literally only did 25s and 50s during practice. I ended up winning the 100 and 200 back that year at Nationals in Greensboro.

How did you end up back here in Nashville?

After graduating med school, I went out to Stanford for residency in radiology and fellowship in nuclear medicine and I fell back in love with swimming. I would sneak away from the radiology reading room at lunch to swim on their master’s team in the beautiful Avery, outdoor swim complex.  We were there during COVID, so master’s swimming unfortunately got cut short.  A few of us would swim in the San Francisco Bay and up in the glacier lakes in Yosemite, which was really liberating during the shut-down. Unfortunately, my mom passed away from COVID about 2 months before the vaccines came out. It was then that we realized we wanted to head back south to be closer to family.

How has NAC and your current work-life collided?

Serendipitously, Vanderbilt had an opening in the physician-scientist track in radiology and needed someone who could help start up PET imaging in the Alzheimer's Center, which is a perfect intersection of my clinical interests (PET and nuclear medicine) with my research interests (Alzheimer's and brain health). I didn't swim with NAC when I was a med student here, but I knew coming back that I would join; I had caught the master’s swimming bug out in California. I looked up the NAC website during my Vanderbilt recruitment to make sure I'd have a team to swim on if I came back.

Why Swimming? Why so early?

Swimming is meditative for me. It's the one time I can totally clear my mind. I literally don't think of anything when I swim except the # of laps we've done.  I'm currently half-time in the clinic reading radiology images like PET images for cancer or Alzheimer's disease, and half-time doing research in the Alzheimer's Center studying the effects of chemotherapy on the brain, so it's so nice to have a time when I'm awake but where my brain almost shuts off. I also love that no one is trying to turn me into a long-distance free-styler, and I can swim backstroke whenever I want, so thanks, coaches, for that :) 

Share your family and work life now. 

I didn't get to mention some of the most important people in my life up there because none of them swim! I met my husband during my first year of med school. I was on a very type-A, hand-selected med school, intramural inner-tube, water polo team. Everyone was either a collegiate water polo player or swimmer. Cody was on the chemistry graduate student team so you can just imagine what their roster looked like. We were destroying them in the round robin finals and Cody decided to make lemonade out of lemons, hooked his foot under my tube and told his team that he was "covering me". We quickly became a couple, moved in together, got two dogs (Bowser (RIP!) and Princess Peach), and got married in 2014. He is a very intense runner and literally sinks in the pool. It's probably for the best we don't overlap in our sports because we're both very competitive.  

My sister, brother-in-law, and dad are out in Colorado doing lots of skiing. My 92-year-old grandma is still feisty down in Sarasota.  Cody's family is in the panhandle of Florida raising horses near 30A, so we have lots of great places to visit during family vacations. 

Any swimming goals? Life goals? 

Swimming goals at this point are just to keep loving it and try to get to two practices a week.  Life goals are to also keep loving it! We are so happy to be back in Nashville. Career-wise, there's this complex relationship between cancer (where cells grow too much) and Alzheimer's (where neurons die too soon), so some studies show that they're inversely related. Then you have the treatments for cancers (i.e., chemotherapy) which increase your risk of Alzheimer's and dementia and have bad side effects on your brain. So, there is a lot going on there and I want to figure out what's happening. I’m now trying to find someone to pay me to do all this work, so I'm writing lots of grants right now!