I do research in the area of cardiovascular diseases and in the area of obesity and diabetes.
I believe that I settled with cardiovascular because of my own personal relationship with
that disease in my family.
My father had his first attack at 51.
He went through three open-heart bypass surgeries and lived until he was 80 because he was so
dedicated to watching his diet but no matter what he did, the lipid problems kept coming
back.
And I think that made me want to know why we weren’t able to help someone like him.
Did I love science as a kid?
No!
I actually wanted to be an English major.
My parents were depression era parents, they hadn’t been given the opportunity to go
to college, and so they told me that I had to go into health care because they wanted
me to always be able to make a living.
I chose pharmacy, and when I was in pharmacy school, one of my professors approached me
about doing research; I didn’t even know it was.
So the first experiment I did was he had these mollusks and I had to add a little drug into
the mollusks.
It was the most boring thing I had ever done in my life, it was amazing that I stayed in
research.
Something intrigued me.
I loved having to come up with a question and designing an approach to tackle the question.
You don’t go into it for the money you go into it because you want to help people.
I made this finding many many tears ago, before the epidemic that we experience in the United
States.
Cells in our body called fat cells make part of the renananthisism system.
This system controls your blood pressure, so if these fat cells are overproducing parts
of this system that could be why obesity is highly linked to problems like high blood
pressure.
So, one of the areas of research that I do is really looking at how can we control that
fat cell and make it stop producing these parts of the system so we can effectively
minimize high blood pressure.
I’m going to tell you about another part of my laboratory work.
This work has been done over the last 15-20 years with collaboration with Alan Daugherty,
who is the head of the Cardiovascular Research Center.
We found that if we expose mice to angiotensin 2, which is the main part of the renananthisism
system, they develop abdominal aortic aneurysms.
This is a very dangerous vascular disease in humans.
You and I, as females, are less likely to get an aneurysm compared to men.
I’m trying to understand why that is.
What I’ve been studying more recently are our chromosomes, specifically our sex chromosomes.
I’ve been looking at the contribution of those sex chromosomes to the vascular disease
of aneurysms.
I think I have made a really exciting finding over the last year.
I can make a little female mouse get an aneurysm basically by giving her the male chromosome.
Why do I think this work is important beyond aneurysms?
Well, we have become more aware in this country of gender and gender identity.
What’s important to me is part of the process of seeking one’s gender is to take certain
types of sex hormones to promote the outcome that you would like for that gender.
My concern or my hopefully contribution is how will that therapy help that person’s
cardiovascular health.
So while I’m also studying aneurysms, I hope that my research has a broader impact
by providing knowledge to people as they seek their own gender identity and what types of
approaches and clinical care they would need to do that.
So for me, what is the point of me doing all of that research if it doesn’t have an effect
or outcome that is beneficial to the community?
Why do we do what we do if it doesn’t make a difference, there is really no point of
it is there.
And that difference can be from my perspective of trying to improve cardiovascular health,
or from the perspective of writing a poem that makes someone’s soul move forward or
elevate.
It’s really all types of work and research that we can do that makes people’s lives
better.