What’s the best way to hammer home the dangers of vaping to teens and tweens? Second-year medical resident Rose Marie Leslie, ’18 M.D., turned to TikTok, the video app that’s taken the under-25 demographic by storm. 

She posted a one-minute video that compares an X-ray of healthy lungs to one of lungs damaged by vaping. “Pretty gnarly,” Leslie says. The video went viral and got national media coverage, starting with Rolling Stone. And many are heeding her advice to stop vaping. 

An ardent health education proponent, Leslie is one of the first in the medical community to use TikTok, where she goes by @DrLeslie. In the last six months, she’s posted daily videos on topics relevant to teens, such as contraception and suicide prevention. That’s in addition to her jam-packed days at North Memorial Health Hospital and the Broadway Family Medicine Clinic. 

Leslie chose the University of Minnesota Medical School because of its exceptional primary care program. Scholarships, including the James H. and Carol E. Moller Scholarship for International Medicine, helped make her education possible. “My goal is to be a family medicine doctor and give back to the community that raised me,” she says.