Penn Medicine “Threshold” Feature and Distinguished Alumni Speech (Perelman School of Medicine, Fall 2025)
“I lost my dad to genetic ALS — the same disease that’s coming for me. I recently received the Distinguished Alumni of the Year Award at my high school, and I poured out my heart, my pain, and my hope for the future.”
Yentli’s story was featured in Threshold, the student magazine of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in the Fall 2025 edition — pages 11–13. The piece captures her journey as an MD–PhD candidate, a C9orf72 genetic carrier, and a patient-scientist racing to find treatments for the disease that took her father and is likely coming for her.
Two years before this post, in October 2023, she attended the McCaskey Distinguished Alumni event with her dad. She lost him to familial ALS ten months later. In her speech as the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, she poured out her grief, her determination, and her hope — in the same building where she and her father had once sat together.
Read the Threshold feature (pp. 11–13) →