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Dr. Hasselmo graduated magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard College, where she studied organismic and evolutionary biology. She discovered her passion for psychiatry and working with young patients while conducting her neuroimaging thesis on social cognition, which won the Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work. Outside the lab, she was an editor for Harvard’s literary and humor magazines.
After graduation, she completed a clinical neuroscience fellowship at Yale’s Child Study Center, working in the Developmental Disabilities Clinic and contributing to research on social functioning and biomarkers of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. After being offered multiple merit-based scholarships, she chose to pursue her MD at Yale School of Medicine.
Throughout medical school, Dr. Hasselmo won the Marguerite Rush-Lerner and PHM Health Professions Creative Medical Writing and Art Contest awards annually for her comics and graphic short stories. She was also honored with the Howard Spiro Society Creative Writing Award in 2022. Many of Dr. Hasselmo’s accomplishments relate to her passion for storytelling. She created a coloring book, called a Hero’s Journey, through collaboration with Yale's inpatient pediatric psychiatry service, to help children and young adolescents demystify and offer guidance through inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Her historical medical research, which also focused on storytelling, earned her the Elias E. Manuelidis Memorial Fund Grant and the William B. Bean Student Research Award.
At Yale, Dr. Hasslemo collaborated with the inpatient pediatric psychiatry and served as a clinical team member at Yale’s HAVEN Free Clinic, providing care to uninsured patients in New Haven. Recognizing the anxiety and stress that often accompany the admissions process, she began using her storytelling and communication skills to help pre-med students craft compelling personal statements and present themselves confidently in interviews.
As a coach, Dr. Hasselmo is both encouraging and adaptable, while also pushing students and aspiring resident physicians to tackle challenging areas and strive for excellence. She approaches problem-solving with creativity and out-of-the-box strategies, ensuring students overcome obstacles along the way. She is also highly detail-oriented and a big-picture thinker, helping students refine every aspect of their application while ensuring each piece contributes to a cohesive and compelling narrative.