Daniela Lamas’08: TV Writer

Daniela Lamas’08

When Daniela Lamas’08 boarded a plane from Boston to Los Angeles in January 2019, she was on the verge of a new plot twist in her career. She would be taking a two-month break from the intensive care unit at Brigham & Women’s Hospital to write a few episodes for the second season of the Fox medical drama “The Resident.”

Until then, Daniela was a pulmonary and critical care doctor who also was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. She has put her writing skills to work as a medical reporter at the Miami Herald, as a contributor to the New York Times, and as the author of a book, “You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Death, and In Between.”

She was eager to apply her experiences to a medical drama, especially one known for its bold, complex take on medicine. She has long been a fan of medical television—she has watched the 15 seasons of “ER” twice—and relished the chance to conjure storylines where the outcomes follow her script.

Since her first stint on “The Resident,” she has signed on as a writer for the show’s third season, which debuted in September. 

“There’s a real deep desire and drive in me to tell stories about what’s happening in the hospital,” says Daniela. “In the beginning, I was drawing on my experiences as an attending physician in pulmonary and critical care medicine. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about what it was like to be a medical student and a resident and returning to those formative memories to plumb them for ideas to bring to the writer’s room.”