(Role)Models - Dr. Salako

Dr. Salako is a full-time psychiatrist and part-time cosplayer based in Texas.

From a very young age, Dr. Salako had an interest in medicine with a life-long dream of becoming a pediatrician. She excelled academically, becoming a President’s Scholar at Southern Methodist University. Upon graduating, she attended medical school and residency at the University of Texas at Southwestern. By the end of medical school, Dr. Salako chose to shift from pediatrics to pursue a career in psychiatry.

In retrospect, a career as a psychiatrist was truly inevitable. Dr. Salako had an appreciation for medicine and science, but also a love for the arts and humanities. While in college, she obtained a degree in English with a Creative Writing Specialization, as an avid reader of just about any genre - fiction, science fiction, young-adult, fan-fiction, and eventually, comic books. Within comic books and the quickly expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dr. Salako read of humans and gods; all of them flawed but each with unique motivations, fears, and goals shaping who they were and who they would become. And when reading about these stories wasn’t enough, she found herself knee-deep in a medium that lifted these characters and their adventures right off the page - cosplay. As “Dr. Cosplay”, Dr. Salako is invited as a guest to conventions, and in 2020, her cosplay work was published in the August edition of Entertainment Weekly.

While Dr. Salako loves books, comics, film, and medicine, the uniting theme is her love for people and the stories they share. After residency, Dr. Salako plans to continue to see patients in an outpatient clinic setting and, in her free time, to continue cosplaying. She hopes to eventually create, write, and publish a unique story of her own.