Sharon Loa

About Sharon Loa

Sharon Loa was born in Puente Piedra, Peru, and immigrated to the United States at age six. Raised in Missoula, Montana, she grew up moving between cultures, languages, and educational systems, an experience that later shaped her interest in building bridges across disciplines. Her work now sits at the interface of physics, engineering, and medicine.

At 16, Sharon became a certified pharmacy technician at St. Patrick’s Hospital, where she first became interested in how medicines act inside the body. She studied biochemistry at the University of Montana and joined Dr. Klara Briknarova’s structural biology laboratory at 18. Within her undergraduate years, she solved several novel protein structures using X-ray crystallography. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and became an adjunct professor of chemistry at 21. At Mayo Clinic, Sharon worked with Dr. Taro Hitosugi, where she contributed to a Nature Metabolism study identifying how activation of pyruvate kinase can reshape cancer metabolism by increasing oxaloacetate and suppressing the Warburg effect.

Sharon is now a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and MD–PhD student in Biophysics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her goal is to develop physics-driven light technologies that reveal skin as a hidden window into disease. She is advancing 3D pathology approaches that make a single skin biopsy far more informative, capturing nerves, protein deposits, and other disease signals in three dimensions. By treating skin as a sensor for the body, her work explores how molecular and structural changes in skin may help diagnose systemic diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes. In parallel, she is developing new ways to make skin temporarily transparent, enabling a broader range of diagnostics and promising new light-based therapies for cutaneous malignancies.

Sharon plans to become a physician-scientist who translates optical physics and tissue engineering into new tools for diagnosis, treatment selection, and less invasive therapy.