Singing a new tune in medicine

Nadia Briones, Class of 2027 at New York Medical College’s School of Medicine in Valhalla, wears many a chapeau – a singer, licensed massage therapist and now a medical student. With an ear attuned to harmony and rhythm and hands adept at healing touch, she has embarked on a career devoted to compassionate care and holistic well-being. 

Briones has always had a gift for music. Born into a musical family in Yorktown, she began singing at the age of 5, exploring various genres, including classical music and jazz, while maintaining a connection to her Argentinian roots through tango. Her formal introduction to music took place when she joined the Taconic Opera, a Yorktown Heights-based company that was looking for children to perform. Briones continued her studies at The Hartt School, the University of Hartford’s performing arts conservatory in West Hartford, and in Milan. Later, she performed with the New York City Opera and The Metropolitan Opera, enjoying a decade-long career.  

“I just look back and think of how much fun I had performing,” said the coloratura soprano, the highest female vocal range. “I loved music production and the whole performance environment.”
 
It was during her time spent singing opera in Milan that her passion for the arts dovetailed with her interest in the sciences as a friend introduced her to the tech start-up Bright Line Eating.  

“The idea of people struggling with food and eating intrigued me,” she said. “I can’t really explain where it came from, but we’ve all encountered our own struggles with our bodies and eating healthily.” 

The start-up marked her initial venture into the sciences, as she worked remotely in customer service, research and IT.
 
Back in New York, Briones continued her work with Bright Line Eating and became more involved in Taconic Opera again, where she helped start a summer opera program for young adults. While she also had performances in between, she started feeling the work from home blues, long before remote employment became the norm in the years of the pandemic.  

“Even though I was grateful that I had a job that allowed me a lot of flexibility, I missed human connection,” she said. 
 
While looking for new work, she found an advertisement for the Finger Lakes School of Massage. There Briones ran into a family friend who was a massage therapist and encouraged her to make a career change.  

“This was a really fun and meaningful way of interacting with the body that I never thought about,” Briones recalled.
  The school would lose its accreditation in 2019, due in part to high staff turnover and poor record keeping, but not before it provided Briones with her first exposure to anatomy – and she loved it.

“My teachers said, ‘You don’t belong here. You belong somewhere where you can really study this stuff in an advanced way.’” At first, Briones shook off the suggestion by her teacher and mentor that she think about a science-based career. Then her massage therapy program was invited by New York Medical College (NYMC) to explore the anatomy lab, though she still thought her teachers were ridiculous when they asked, “Can you see yourself here?”
 A few years later, she would be in that same lab, engrossed in anatomy with the same professors she encountered during her tour. After working at an athletic center providing massage therapy for Olympic weightlifters, she wanted to advance her knowledge in health care and interact with health in various ways. The familiarity and homeyness of NYMC made her choice of medical school easy.
With a guitar in hand and a certification in massage therapy, Briones brings a unique perspective to medicine. As a School of Medicine (SOM) student senator, she helped to organize a public speaking workshop this month at the Phillip Capozzi, M.D., Library to teach students ways to communicate with an audience. Inspired by her undergraduate studies in performance, she sees a need for students to master the art of communication in the medical field. And that’s just the beginning of what she hopes to impart.
“I’ve been a student nonstop almost since I was born,” said Briones, who still sings, appearing with Choral Chameleon, smaller local community choirs and the Taconic Opera and Hudson River Opera. “I know it’s early in my medical education, but I fantasize about all the different specialties I could pursue. It’s hard to choose one now, but I can see myself happily being a physician, knowing that my scope would end at the depths of the field and not the width.” 

For more, visit nymc.edu.