LYNN — If you asked Raymi Ramirez from Chestnut Street what she wanted to be when she started college, she would have answered: an astronaut.
Although she has yet to touch the surface of the moon, she still reached for the stars.
This spring, Ramirez graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a Ph.D. in medical physics and recently began her residency in UCLA’s Department of Radiation Oncology.
“If I could get myself out of Chestnut Street and in LA next to Ronald Reagan Hospital, anybody can do anything they want to do,” Ramirez said. “It’s just really about tenacity and seeing things through.”
For Ramirez, the accomplishment is about more than earning a doctorate. She hopes her journey helps make careers in science and medicine feel attainable for the next generation growing up in Lynn.
A graduate of Lynn Public Schools, Ramirez attended Ingalls Elementary School, Breed Middle School, one year at Lynn Classical High School, and three years at Lynn English High School. She is also the first doctor in her family.
She said growing up in Lynn taught her resilience, resourcefulness, and grit — how to “do a lot with a little.” She credits teachers who invested in her beyond the classroom, along with classmates and families who fostered a strong sense of community. Those experiences, she said, helped her develop the persistence and networking skills that have carried her through years of higher education.
She said she wants her career to be more accessible. “I have been very blessed to have the right type of resources and the right type of experiences to get me here, but I would say a lot of it has been luck, and there are so many amazing potential scientists, writers, or research coordinators that exist in places like Lynn, where a lot of that career trajectory is a little less clear, and so I would want to make things like this more clear, more accessible to Black and Brown kids and low socioeconomic backgrounds.”
Ramirez said her curiosity began early. As a child, she was fascinated by animals before developing a love for math. That passion evolved in high school when she discovered physics.
“I’ve always been a very curious person,” she said. “I had such a love for math that when I found physics, I knew this was the kind of problem-solving I wanted to do.”
She spent about five years at UCLA earning her doctorate in medical physics, focusing her research on medical imaging. Her research aims to “understand what we can quantify about the images that tell us something about pathology,” Ramirez said.
Her work is especially meaningful because of her family’s experience with cancer. Both of her parents are cancer survivors. Her father completed treatment in 2021, while her mother is still undergoing care.
“Now that I’m someone who works closely with the disease, I was able to not only show up as a daughter and as a person, but I was also able to show up as a professional,” she said.
She added, “For them to see me in a robe, to hear people call me ‘doctor,’ to see me start residency — those are things that can’t even be explained how amazing it is.”
Despite the years of education and training, Ramirez said she is just getting started; she hopes to be a Nobel Laureate in the future.
Ramirez’s mother, Olga Guzman, said Ramirez took advantage of every opportunity Lynn Public Schools had to offer.
“I am so proud, because she has been a hard worker since she was little, and she’s always said, ‘I love school. I love this school,’” Guzman said, adding that she knew from early on her daughter was going to do great things in her life.
