Zei gezunt un shtark
(be healthy and strong)
(be healthy and strong)
Reflection of my foot onto a Baltimore street
Work
I’m a geneticist and molecular cancer epidemiologist. I've been in genetics in 2007, when I learned medical genetics and public health on the job working for the State of Washington’s Newborn Screening Program. This led me to pursue academic training in genetics and epidemiology, which I did at Johns Hopkins (MPH), the National Cancer Institute (predoctoral fellowship), the University of Washington (PhD), and the University of Bristol (first postdoc). I currently work in Prof Susan Neuhausen's molecular cancer epidemiology lab at City of Hope, a cancer research and treatment center that serves the second largest metropolis in the US. I use approaches within statistical genetics and clinical epidemiology to gain insight into cancer etiology and progression in human populations. I've studied cancer predisposition in families, sex-specific (testicular, prostate, breast, and ovarian) cancers, transcriptional regulation (methylation) in shift workers, and ethnic differences in tumor molecular (PAM50 expression) subtypes.
Beyond cancer research, I value scientific and societal discussions that delve into human nature and behavior. I've written six essays for the public, published in Nature, Quillette, Areo, Quilliam, and Psychreg. I've written about authoritarianism in genetics, the value of humanism and science, female-intrasexual competition, antisemitism on the Left, and Cambridge Divinity’s mistaken tribalism. 
|
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.
|
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.
--
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.
