"Hi.
My name is Annesa Flentje and I'm a researcher at UCSF.
And I study ways that discriminatory processes impact health and specifically looking at
how they might change health at the cellular level.
Well, I grew up in the AIDS epidemic.
And so right around the time that I was in elementary school kids were starting to ask
questions like can you get AIDS from a toilet seat and what are the different ways that
I might get this disease?
And how can I be safe from it?
So when I was in fifth or sixth grade, the surgeon general at the time came out with
his recommendations for AIDS.
It was C. Everett Koop.
And he came out with this booklet that was mailed to every American household about AIDS,
telling people information about it.
And so I took it upon myself to read this booklet in depth and disseminate the information
to all of the students at my elementary school.
To explain to them how you could get it, what the symptoms were and tell them more about
that disease.
So I do social science research and so generally speaking, the research that I do is with people
who are experiencing discrimination or stigma due to something about them.
And so what I look at is how discrimination and stigma can actually make people less healthy.
Just by having experienced that discrimination.
So when I think about things that have made me be interested in that, I think it's that
seeing things that aren't fair, that are not equitable tend to pull me in to do something
about that kind of problem.
As a social scientist being in the field means being with people and as a social scientist
working with underprivileged populations it often means working in communities where people
don't have enough food, enough money.
So some scientists will be in a lab or be out collecting specimens and I tend to work
in places where people don't have enough resources.
What I'm, the project that I'm in the works of putting together right now is going to
look at kind of if there's group differences for people who have experienced a lot of discrimination
versus not.
If there's group differences in the genes that they're expressing and specifically genes
that would sort of activate your immune system or inflame your body because generally speaking
inflammation, extended inflammation can be pretty bad.
So you look at this, you can look at this leukocytes in the blood.
And so that's one piece of it.
The other piece that I'm interested in is can psychological treatment so a cognitive
behavioral intervention targeting that stress, can it actually change your genes so that,
what genes you're expressing so that before maybe you were expressing a lot of inflammatory
genes, after this intervention, this psychological intervention, can that be reduced so that
that stress is not going into your body so much?
I think that all science points to the idea that experiencing a discriminatory event,
being called names due to something about you can actually change the ways that your
genes work and in doing so can directly sort of affect your lifespan and how long you're
going to live, how well you fight disease.
If they experience kind of a discriminatory event, that they experience it as a stressor
and that stress actually changes the way that their cells work and the way that they repair
themselves and the way that their immune system works.
And that's what I'm really interested in.
And what I'm also interested in is is there something we can do to reverse that?
So, bad things happen to people.
Is there something that we can do in the middle to make it so that their cells don't have
to suffer?
What's the fun part of being an academic?
You get to like have your mind blown all the time by all these new ideas and it's your
job to read about them and study them and it's a good line of work."