BRITON BREAKTHROUGHS FROM THE HOSPITAL FRONT LINES TO THE AIRWAVES, AND TO THE FOREFRONT OF MEDICAL RESEARCH AT THE EARLY AND LATE STAGES OF LIFE, MEET AN ALBION ALUMNI TRIO AT THE TOP OF THEIR FIELD.
Battling COVID-19, and Taking House Calls For Dr. Mia Taormina, ’00, infectious disease expert and burgeoning Chicago radio star, the last year has been nothing she ever expected yet everything for which she prepared. “In one period, I worked 77 straight days,” she says. “But the thought was, with my colleagues and me, ‘We’ve got to do this, so let’s do it.’ I haven’t had a day off in a year but that was the way it was going to be. This is what I trained
20 | Albion College Io Triumphe!
for. Something has happened and I was ready.” Yes, something had happened. And Taormina, who majored in biology and English at Albion and always knew medicine was
going to be in her future, was on the front lines almost from the beginning. It was the coronavirus, a virulent and previously unseen version of an ancient virus, that first made an appearance in the world in late 2019, found its way to the United States early in 2020, and has wreaked havoc for more than a year. As part of DuPage Medical Group (DMG), the largest independent, multispecialty physician group in Illinois with more than 750
physicians in over 100 suburban Chicago locations, Taormina diagnosed her first case of the illness in early March and knew instinctively that the respiratory disease, which would be known to all as COVID-19, would get worse— much worse—before it got better. “There was definitely a sense that we were in crisis mode,” she says. “It was quite unbelievable. There were so many cases at one point that we looked like a field hospital.”
