Reflection on Receiving the 2025 McCaskey Distinguished Alumni Award
“What are you going to do after you cure ALS?”
A McCaskey High School student asked Yentli this the day she received the 2025 McCaskey Distinguished Alumni Award — and the question stopped her. It assumed the cure. It assumed she would survive to see it. In this video reflection, she shares what it meant to return to her high school as an honoree and to speak to students about what she is doing, why she is doing it, and who she is doing it for.
The award recognized not only her accomplishments as a physician-scientist in training, but her public mission to find a treatment for the genetic form of ALS and FTD that took her father and that she herself carries. Standing in front of a room of young people who looked at her and saw someone who would cure a disease — not someone who might die from one — was its own kind of medicine.