Zei gezunt un shtark
(be healthy and strong)
(be healthy and strong)
Reflection of my foot onto a Baltimore street
Work
I am geneticist and molecular cancer epidemiologist. I work as a post-doctoral scientist at City of Hope, a cancer research and treatment center in Los Angeles. Broadly, I'm aimed at understanding cancer in human populations and use multiple "omics" technologies and approaches within statistical genetics and clinical epidemiology to gain insight into cancer etiology. I've studied:
I trained in genetics and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, the National Cancer Institute, the University of Washington, where I obtained my PhD in genetics, weaving circadian biology and ethics, and at the University of Bristol, where I did my first postdoc. For my dissertation, I explored genome-wide DNA methylation in day and night shiftworkers and argued that shiftwork is a topic that deserves more air time in public discourse and more research dollars in science. The ethical argument got published in Nature. For my time at the University of Bristol, I learned a method that tackles the problem of confounding and reverse causation in epidemiological research. This is a technique called Mendelian randomization. It uses genetic proxies (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) as instrumental variables in statistical models. It's a way to use the data generated from genome-wide association studies that goes beyond mere association to improve causal inference when randomized-controlled trials are not possible. At City of Hope, I'm working to reduce disparities in our understanding of cancer by characterizing molecular differences in tumor subtypes amongst breast cancer patients who are from Hispanic and non-Hispanic White backgrounds. I'm using RNA-seq to do this. I'm also doing integrative genomics for the same set of Hispanic breast cancer patients, combining the RNA-seq data in tumor with whole-exome sequencing of the germline and tumor tissue. Beyond the technical aspects of my job, I value engagement in societal-level discussions that extend well beyond cancer research and into human nature. Cancer is but one area of health and well-being. I've written three essays for the public on the following topics: moral authoritarianism in genetics, female-intrasexual competition, and humanism. |
Play
I enjoy taking photos, painting, and cycling. 
I'm standing on Muses Hill in Athens, which overlooks the Ancient Agora, the birthplace of democracy.
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Cemetery in Bristol
What's a website without a quote? Here's one I like:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here (Dawkins via Pinker in: Pinker, 2014, p.13).
Dawkins's stunning words are found in my favorite book, The Sense of Style, a pleasure-packed read, which has taught me what to aim for as an academic writer. In the interdisciplinary field of public health genetics, the importance of good communication can't be overstated. But what is good writing and can I figure out how to do it for the nightshift?
"A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts" (Pinker, 2014, p. 21).
Quick cut: ~15% of full-time workers in the US work nonstandard hours, many during their biological night. But the poor and those from minority backgrounds arrive at work at midnight much more frequently than the well-paid and those from non-minority populations. Does this difference deserve our attention? Shift workers are at a greater risk for many of the conditions that plague our otherwise prosperously aging society: obesity, metabolic disorders, psychological distress, and (presumptively) cancer. What needs to happen so that the poor and vulnerable are not at disproportionate risk for chronodisruption-related chronic diseases?
Chronodisruption's the collateral damage that occurs when sleep and activity patterns are disrupted. With many of our genes under circadian control, many genes are turned on and off throughout the 24-hour cycle. If we picture the temporal activity patterns of gene transcription, we see we are genetically different organisms in the morning and evening. Since this fundamental process evolved in response to strong light and dark signals, shift work throws a machete into the body's relationship with the outside world and with itself.
Parenthetical: The last sentence above originally read as "throws a wrench into the body's relationship..." I'm so accustomed to thinking about chronodisruption that the idiom throws a wrench brings fresh imagery to my head. But since I'm describing chronodisruption to all of you, I'm hoping you see that large, awkward knife spinning and lacerating what's natural for us: sleep and all the activities (cellular and behavioral) that we engage in daily.
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Source of quotes from a remarkable book:
Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. New York: Viking Penguin.
"A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts" (Pinker, 2014, p. 21).
Quick cut: ~15% of full-time workers in the US work nonstandard hours, many during their biological night. But the poor and those from minority backgrounds arrive at work at midnight much more frequently than the well-paid and those from non-minority populations. Does this difference deserve our attention? Shift workers are at a greater risk for many of the conditions that plague our otherwise prosperously aging society: obesity, metabolic disorders, psychological distress, and (presumptively) cancer. What needs to happen so that the poor and vulnerable are not at disproportionate risk for chronodisruption-related chronic diseases?
Chronodisruption's the collateral damage that occurs when sleep and activity patterns are disrupted. With many of our genes under circadian control, many genes are turned on and off throughout the 24-hour cycle. If we picture the temporal activity patterns of gene transcription, we see we are genetically different organisms in the morning and evening. Since this fundamental process evolved in response to strong light and dark signals, shift work throws a machete into the body's relationship with the outside world and with itself.
Parenthetical: The last sentence above originally read as "throws a wrench into the body's relationship..." I'm so accustomed to thinking about chronodisruption that the idiom throws a wrench brings fresh imagery to my head. But since I'm describing chronodisruption to all of you, I'm hoping you see that large, awkward knife spinning and lacerating what's natural for us: sleep and all the activities (cellular and behavioral) that we engage in daily.
--
Source of quotes from a remarkable book:
Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. New York: Viking Penguin.
