Suzie Brown, MD ’02: cardiologist by day, award-winning singer-songwriter by night. For nearly three years, Brown, a cardiologist at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, has been moonlighting as a singer, performing across the East Coast as the 2010 “Best of Philly” musical talent winner.

Since beginning her musical career just a few years ago, she’s performed from Cambridge to Philadelphia to New York City, and played with and opened for the likes of Livingston Taylor, Lyle Lovett, and Josh Ritter. Her first full-length CD, Heartstrings, came out in May 2011. Barry McGuire, who produced albums for Natalie Merchant and Amos Lee, produced the album.

She scored a major coup when the title song of “Heartstrings” was picked up by Play Network to play in coffee shops, restaurants, and clothing stores, exposing millions of Americans to Brown’s music.

Brown’s path from doctor to musician was full of unexpected twists and turns. Music was a huge part of the Brown household when she was a child. “My parents played a lot of music in the house. My father would play guitar and we would all sing 'lefty' folk songs,” she says. Despite her musical upbringing, Brown was shy about singing outside the house. As Brown’s parents are both doctors in academic medicine, Brown grew up hearing about medicine over the dinner table. “In school math and science came easy to me, so [going into medicine] seemed like the logical thing to do,” she says of her decision to pursue medicine over music. It was only in her senior year of college that Brown joined her college’s a capella group on a whim. “It was an affirmative life-changing experience,” she says. After graduating from college, she worked full-time in a basic science lab and devoted nights to signing and playing guitar, but Brown saw it as more of a hobby than a possible career path. “Throughout medical school and residency, I fit in music wherever I could but I didn’t think I could make a career of it.”

After clinical training, music became a larger part of Brown’s life. She had nights and weekends free “for the first time in my adult life” and started going to shows and meeting Philadelphia musicians. A friend egged her on to write her own songs, and finally she did, performing at an open mic night. “Within a few weeks people began to ask me to play shows with them, real shows,” she says. After her first official gig, “it was clear to me that music made me happier than anything I had ever done,” she says. “It became clear to me that I had to do this.”

Brown’s jobs couldn’t be more different, but she sees them as complementary. While medicine requires Brown to give herself entirely to her patients, performing requires her to be completely vulnerable.

“Medicine is something that requires you to put yourself behind everything you're doing. The patient comes first, no matter what you’re feeling. Whether you’re hungry, whether you just broke up with your boyfriend, stubbed your toe, you have to put it away and leave it for later,” she says. “That can be really hard because you cant be who you are, but it’s a necessity because otherwise you couldn’t be there for the patient.”

“Music for me is the opposite. I needed a way to just be myself and not hide my emotions,” she says. “You expose your emotional insides to everyone.”

The transitions between the two jobs are “stressful,” she says, but she loves doing both. “When I go back to work and take care of patients who have life-threatening illnesses and depend on you, it’s really hard. I adjust my frame of mind and then when I go back to singing, I have to change my frame of mind again.”

You’ll get a chance to talk to the rising star in person come Reunion 2012 when she attends her 10th Reunion. “The friends you make in med school last a lifetime,” she says. And what does she expect to be doing when her 15th Reunion rolls around? “I hope to be writing songs and performing them, hope to be feeling like I’m growing as a musician, and having fun with it, whatever that means,” she says.