Global Medical Training

April 10, 2018

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What do you research on here?

I'm in the department of Molecular Toxicology here at Berkeley. I'm a second year PhD student. I'm getting ready to take my qualifying exam soon, super scary. I'm in environmental toxicology, so I study environmental contaminants and how they cause adverse health effects, mainly with a focus on arsenic exposure. I look at epigenetics as well altered metabolism. 

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In our Intro to Toxicology discussion, you mentioned you also conducted research in Chile. May you please share about your experience there?

This past summer, I spent three months in Chile, specifically in a northern town called Antotagasta, which is a fourteen hour bus ride from Santiago. I collected bio-specimen samples from people who were born from in the fifties and seventies. In Antotagasta, there was a huge arsenic water contamination because they sourced together two sources of water. When they did that, there was a high prevalence of arsenic in that water, so all these people were exposed in neo and early life. Now forty, fifty years down the line, they are forty-five to fifty-nine year of age. Now we are looking at adverse health effects from this arsenic exposure, so it's an early life exposure with a long latency period, so it makes an interesting epidemical study. 

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What was some challenges you faced in your research at Chile?

During research not at Berkeley is really hard. I think we are really fortunate here at Berkeley, because you know we have everything at the snap of our fingers. You can order stuff really easily. If you don't have something in your lab, you can go to the Barker storage room and get something easily; whereas in Chile, it was really hard. We had to ship our dry ice every week, have someone to pick it up from the airport, have a taxi driver from the airport drive it, and it came ten'o clock on Fridays. We had to store it in the morgue of a hospital.

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In a morgue?

Yeah, with a bunch of dead people at ten'o clock at night. You realized how convenient and how lucky we are here until you're really thrown in something like that, so that was one thing. The other thing is that I have also done ventry search, and this was when I got to interact with subjects a lot more. They were really hard to work with. You know when someone say,"Oh I'll be there at ten," and you're reply, "Cool you'll come at ten. We'll schedule the next subject at ten-thirty, eleven" and then next thing you know, they all come at 8am. You react with "Wait, you're not supposed to be here until ten-thirty" or no one comes in when you have four people to come in, so that's also a big challenge I get to work with as well, but it was a cool trip. 

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How did you decide to research arsenic contamination?

Arsenic kinda choose me in a way, but I chose to pursue it. How I came about my PhD program is that I fell into it because I never planned this for myself. After I got my Bachelors in Chemistry, I went to Guatemala for six months, and I heard about water contamination with cyanide and thought, "Oh this is very interesting" and I sorta know what I want to do with my life like 

I will get my masters and do global health. While I was at UCSF doing my masters, I was mentored by someone who has an arsenic project. He asked me, "Oh do you know how to do PCRs" and I replied, "Yeah, I actually spent a summer learning how to do PCRs" He then replied, "Okay, I'm going to throw you into this lab and you'll be great." I found myself in this lab at Berkeley, then time goes on. When it was time to apply for a PhD program, I thought, "Oh, okay why not?" Like I said before, arsenic chose me and I have continued to pursue it because the science of it is pretty interesting. Arsenic is a pretty nasty chemical, and you know even in the US we had a bunch of wine contaminated with arsenic, so it's still pretty relevant to the US which is what I like. It's a really great way to tie in my global health background to my chemistry, which I never thought I was going to do chemistry again. What I really like about researching arsenic because you get the best of both worlds by bringing them together.

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What do want everyone to know about arsenic contamination?

It's hard to say about it because research and translation get lost really easily too. We found these discoveries in Berkeley and they're great, and they never make it to the community. For the US population in general, you're not going to be exposed to arsenic contamination where it would be a concern, so people should not worry. But I think what we really need is more advocacy in research translation, so that the stuff we are doing here will reach populations like Bangladesh, which currently have the highest arsenic exposure, but it does not the capability to do anything about it. The people in Bangladesh know they have this exposure, but they can't do everything, so they live with it, whereas in the US we have a problem, but the levels are not as high as Bangladesh's. We have the resources to deal with it ,whereas places that are low, middle income countries have a lot higher exposures without the need to do anything. I think a lot of it is due part of policy issues as well research translation issues. 

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Anything else to add?

Overall, I really like doing field work in these low-resource settings, and you have to make really high capacity science work in limited resource settings. In Chile, it is a middle income country, so it's not considered a low resource setting. It's not easy, but it's fun. You have to be really creative and be able to problem solve on your feet and make really weird things work like storing dried ice in the only negative degrees freezer that happens to be a morgue of a hospital. I think that's it.

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Thank you Amanda for spending time with me sharing your research and stories with us.

No problem

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