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Bio
I got my bachelor of arts in speech pathology and audiology and my first graduate degree in applied linguistics, both from Northern Arizona University. Then I became a chaplain; I provided emotional and psychosocial palliative care for patients and families at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. I was 24 and struck by the inevitability of death and moved to my core by the wails of the grieving and the stories of the bedridden. I found myself wanting to be more than a listening ear -- to prevent people from ever being in the hospital in the first place. I knew being a physician wasn't the answer, because physicians treat existing illnesses. I wanted to know what causes cancer, congenital disorders, psychiatric suffering, and diabetes -- to prevent them all.
Four years later, I learned there was an entire scientific discipline dedicated to fulfilling that wish: public health. I began working in a genetics laboratory that did population screening of newborns. Every baby born in Washington State got a “heel prick,” and their blood was screened for innate metabolic disorders. The aim was to identify and put sick babies on treatment before anyone noticed they were sick. Amazingly, I had stumbled into public health -- an empirical way to reduce suffering.
While with the newborn screening program, I was introduced to medical genetics and epidemiology, the study of diseases and their prevention in human populations. But getting just a taste of these wasn’t enough. I wanted formal training and left Seattle for a master’s in public health (MPH) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And the fascination grew. Afterwards, I did a yearlong fellowship in the Clinical Genetics Branch of the National Cancer Institute, where I began studying rare cancers (testicular germ-cell tumors) with Dr. Mark Greene and cancer-predisposition syndromes (e.g., ribosomopathies) with Dr. Blanche Alter. Then I got my PhD in public-health genetics at the University of Washington.
My dissertation had two parts: one empirical and one in the humanities. I did the empirical half at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the epigenetics of shift work under Dr. Parveen Bhatti, an environmental epidemiologist. I did the humanities half on the ethical landscape of working at night with Dr. Wylie Burke, former head of American Society of Human Genetics. The dissertation products were published in three different scholarly venues: an epigenetics journal, an ethics journal, and Nature.
Several months before graduating, I moved to England to learn Mendelian randomization, a causal-inference technique that uses genetics to study the environment, everything that isn’t genetic. Mendelian randomization mimics a randomized-controlled trial and avoids most sources of environmental confounding in observational studies.
I trained for two years at the University of Bristol, which specializes in Mendelian randomization, and published Mendelian randomization studies before returning to the U.S. to a cancer hospital, City of Hope in Los Angeles. At City of Hope, I published more Mendelian randomization studies and began working with gene expression data. I'm now finishing my last years as a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, where I'm weaving together Mendelian randomization, gene expression, nucleolar biology (ribosomal biogenesis), and reproductive health.
I aim to discover regulatory causes of diseases in human populations and to understand what makes us who we are and why we age.
Research Interests
Papers共 35 篇Author StatisticsCo-AuthorSimilar Experts
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引用量
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期刊级别
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Communications Biologyno. 1 (2024): 1-12
Cancer researchno. 15 (2023): 2600-2613
HUMAN REPRODUCTIONno. 8 (2023): 1429-1444
Translational psychiatryno. 1 (2022): 193-193
Leah Martin,Yu Zhang,Olivia First,Vicente Mustieles,Robin Dodson,Gabriela Rosa, Ayanna Coburn -Sanderson,Charleen D. Adams,Carmen Messerlian
medRxiv (2021)
Illness, crisis, and loss/Illness, crisis & lossno. 3 (2021): 353-364
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Author Statistics
#Papers: 35
#Citation: 221
H-Index: 8
G-Index: 14
Sociability: 5
Diversity: 2
Activity: 20
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