by Jeff Bendix

Sometimes the discovery of a career field can come about in unlikely ways.

Atossa Alavi, a student at the CWRU School of Law, is a good example. A native of Iran-and trained as a dentist in London-Alavi expects to land a job in the field of patent law after graduation from the law school next week.

"As a child growing up in Mashad (a town in northeastern Iran), I wanted to be a dentist, so when I was 17, my parents sent me to University College in London," Alavi said. "I studied for four and a half years and then worked for a couple of years in a general practice in London. I decided that was not for me, so I went to work in oral and maxiofacial surgery departments in various hospitals, working on repairing injuries to the head and neck. That was very satisfying, because at the end of every day you feel like you've done something useful."

Eventually Alavi decided she wanted to pursue a doctorate. While investigating a program in San Francisco, she met the man who was to become her husband, a researcher at Kent State University. After a trans-Atlantic courtship, Alavi married in 1999 and moved to Hudson, Ohio, where she began to think about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

"I naturally considered continuing with dentistry, but to practice in the U.S. would have meant sitting the last two years of dental school, and the school here didn't have any openings," she said. "So I thought it was time for a change of career. I decided to study law because I knew it was diverse enough that I could use much of my knowledge and past experience."

She enrolled in the law school in 2000 and quickly discovered that she enjoyed studying law and had an aptitude for it. She was named a contributing editor to Law Review.

Her Note, "The Stem Cell Compromise: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Constitutional Implications of the Bush Plan" is due to be published in a forthcoming issue of Health Matrix, the journal of CWRU's Law-Medicine Center.

"My previous post-graduate courses really helped me cope with law school," she said. "They taught me to focus and concentrate on what's really important. I had also done a lot of writing. I'd had seven papers published in peer-reviewed journals. The writing experience turned out to be very important, especially because English is my second language, and you need to do a lot of writing in law school."

In the summer of 2002, Alavi worked at the prestigious Cleveland law firm Jones Day. She also gave birth to a daughter, Kimya. Spending time with Kimya, she said, has replaced her previous leisure-time activities, which included kick-boxing, rock climbing, gardening, opera and movies.

Alavi has been offered a full-time position with Jones Day after graduation, where she hopes to practice patent law.

"I have a strong background in science, and you really need that in order to be a patent attorney," she said. "Ideally I could work on patents involving new dental inventions. That would really combine my areas of expertise and would be very satisfying."

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