The You're listening to nocter. I'm Vanessa Lowe.

You're listening to nocter. I'm Vanessa Lowe.

Hospitals are amazing places. They're emblems of the modern medical technology that saves and improves our lives in

countless ways every day.

But if you've ever roamed the halls of a hospital in the middle of the night

with its shiny, echoy surfaces, background hum of anxiety,

and distant monitors chiming like beacons of peril,

you're in no rush to return. But if you must, you'll want someone like Shoshana Ungerlider

there, keeping an eye on things.

I am a hospital-based internal medicine physician

and I practice in San Francisco.

So I'm a nocturnist. The hospitalists that work at night, we were called

nocturnists. Shoshana came to medicine in a roundabout way. First and foremost, I always knew from being a very young child that I wanted to be in service of others.

The question at first was which others she would be in service to.

And I found myself actually toward the end of college

studying marine biology.

And I was applying to PhD programs

and doing a bunch of research.

I found myself walking into the lab every morning to check on my little intertidal mollusks, these limpets that I was studying.

I was doing an animal behavior experiment, and I would talk to them and I a few months into that was like they're

never going to talk back so maybe I need to be working with human beings I think I'll

get more out of that. So Shoshana left the world of mollisks behind.

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