April 19, 2010
Amrita School of Medicine, Kochi
 

Dr. Shikha Goyal from the Department of Radiotherapy, Dr. Yatheesha B. L. from the Department of Pediatrics and Dr. P. Velammal from the Department of General Medicine were all recently honored with gold medals.
 

The month of April saw these DNB candidates from the Health Sciences campus in Kochi qualify for this honor in their respective specializations. Gold medals are awarded to those candidates that score the highest marks in the DNB final exam.
 

Conducted by the National Board of Examinations, the exam leads to the award of the DNB or the Diplomate of National Board. A DNB is considered equivalent to postgraduate or, in some cases, even post-doctorate degrees.
 

We spoke to one of these successful candidates, Dr. Shikha Goyal.
 

“After completing my MBBS from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, I enrolled for an MD in Radiotherapy from the same institution. After this, I worked at AIIMS for nearly three years.”
 

Dr. Shikha joined Amrita in March 2010. She currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in Radiation Oncology.
 

“Radiation Oncology provides an opportunity to experience and master the technical know-how of a super-specialty right from post-graduation,” states Dr. Shikha. “I have learned far more than I had ever expected, when I first chose to take it up as my postgraduate discipline.”
 

Dr. Shikha’s work has been published in several national and international journals. She has experience in treating patients with breast cancer, studying the response of their brain metastases to the drug letrozole. For head and neck cancers, she studied the effect of oral pilocarpine on treatment-related morbidity in patients receiving curative radiotherapy.
 

In addition, she has experience in treating several types of brain tumors in adults and children including rare tumors such as gliofibroma, a tumor affecting young people, impacting their brain and the spinal cord. She has published a report describing three such patients; this constitutes 10% of all known cases worldwide.
 

“These tumors do not figure in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of central nervous system tumors,” she shares. “This paper reports our experience with cases showing varied clinical presentation and behavior, thus attempting to extend the spectrum of existing knowledge about these tumors.”
 

An achiever throughout her career, Dr. Shikha was a national talent scholar, while in high school. This scholarship is awarded to the best students nation-wide by the Government of India.
 

We congratulate her on this latest achievement.