Despite strong recommendations from the CDC, pregnant people in the U.S. continue to show low vaccination rates against COVID-19. It's been a tough choice for many parents or soon-to-be parents, so in this episode, we dig into the details. UC San Diego Health experts Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, MD, Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH, and Lars Bode, PhD, all weigh in on the latest research and recommendations. We also speak with San Diego mom Jasmine Faniel about her concerns and what it was like to face this choice during her pregnancy. Learn more about the safety of exposures in pregnancy and breastfeeding at mothertobaby.org.

Academic scientists rely on grants to fund their research, and the largest funder of biomedical research is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unfortunately, many of the racial inequities in academic science have trickled their way into this grant funding process. As it stands, applications from African-American or Black scientists are less likely to be funded by federal funding agencies than applications submitted by white scientists. In this episode, Michael Taffe, PhD, a professor at UC San Diego, explains the complex root causes of this disparity and what scientists and institutes can do to address it. (Read his paper on the topic here: https://elifesciences.org/articles/65697)

David Gonzalez, PhD, is an associate professor at UC San Diego, where his lab studies how bacteria affect our health. He’s also a first-generation Mexican-American from San Diego County. Gonzalez, like his siblings, dropped out of high school, got a job and started a family. But when he found himself mowing lawns across the street of the local community college, something inside him shifted. In this episode, Gonzalez shares his unique journey through academia, and honors the mentors who inspired him along the way.

Climate change and COVID-19 are arguably the two greatest crisis of our time. The other thing they have in common is the fact that they disproportionately affect the same people — primarily underserved populations and communities of color. In this episode, we speak with Tarik Benmarhnia, PhD, about his work on environmental justice, and how it plays a role in the health of a community, whether that’s due to an infectious disease, pollutants, heatwaves or wildfires. If we can improve the structural fundamental causes of these issues and these inequalities, he says, we’ll be able to build more resilient communities.

Despite political risk to researchers and participants, a new study provides the first glimpse into the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on health care workers in Nicaragua, a country where the government refuses to acknowledge that there is a pandemic, or do anything about it. Researcher James McKerrow, MD, PhD, discusses his work with colleague Jorge Huete-Pérez, PhD. Richard Feinberg, PhD, provides his insights as an expert on U.S.-Latin American relations.

More than 5 million people around the world die from causes associated with a lack of physical activity. The news comes as many people have transitioned to working from home, are dealing with local gyms closing and may be sheltering-in-place as we face the COVID-19 pandemic. Two research teams from UC San Diego School of Medicine sought to understand sedentary lifestyles, with one finding that even light physical activity, including just standing, can benefit health, and the other that Americans are still sitting too much.

Around the world, at least 53 COVID-19 vaccines are currently undergoing clinical trials. Four of the largest and most promising have reached the final Phase III stage. UC San Diego is a testing site for three of the big four: Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen/Johnson & Johnson. In this episode, we speak with Susan Little, MD, principal investigator for two COVID-19 clinical trials in San Diego that are focused on finding a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Little discusses the science behind vaccines, how they will work to address the current pandemic, and when a potential COVID-19 vaccine will be ready.

We don’t yet have a vaccine to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, but we do have a vaccine for another respiratory virus: influenza. In this episode, infectious disease physician Michele Ritter, MD, talks about the difference between flu and COVID, whether it’s possible to get both and why it’s more important than ever to get your flu vaccine this year.

In this episode we speak with Aaron Carlin, MD, PhD, and Sandra Leibel, MD, assistant professors and physician-scientists at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Carlin studies viruses such as Zika virus and Leibel has developed “mini lungs” – stem cell-based organoids that grow in a petri dish in the lab, where she can study diseases that affect newborn lungs. That’s what they were doing six months ago, anyway. Then SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that has caused the COVID 19 pandemic, entered our lives. Carlin and Leibel quickly teamed up to explore what happens to the lungs when they are infected with SARS-CoV-2, and how we might be able to mitigate that damage.

In this episode, Candis Morello, pharmacist and educator at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego, shares her career path — inspired by her grandmother's peach tree — and explains how pharmacists have become an integral part of a patient's health care team. Her diabetes tune-up clinic provides an example of how pharmacists can improve patient outcomes and help lower health care costs. Read more here https://go.ucsd.edu/2DuiI0o and here https://go.ucsd.edu/3kqhynx.

By day, postdoctoral researcher Beata Mierzwa, PhD, studies cellular division. By night, she makes clothing — dresses, pants, shoes, backpacks — covered in colorful dividing cells. In this episode, she talks about her love of both science and art, how her unique designs help get people excited about science, and her new role as an IF/THEN Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Learn more about Mierzwa and her projects at https://beatascienceart.com and https://www.ifthenshecan.org/ambassadors.

Lisa Madlensky, PhD, director of the Family Cancer Genetics Program at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, explains the difference between medical grade DNA tests and consumer genetic analysis like 23andMe. She talks about the nuggets that can be derived from consumer products and what might not apply. She cautions us not to use consumer products to make medical decisions. Instead, if you're concerned about your health risk, talk to a genetic counselor.

As a kid, Alec Calac knew he wanted to be a doctor, following in his father's footsteps — but it wasn't until he started college in another state and left his community behind that he discovered his second passion: advocacy. Now, as a second year MD/PhD student at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Alec spoke with us about his personal experiences and how he fills his "spare" time advocating for more visibility and support for Native Americans in STEM and medical careers.

Susan Hopkins, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and radiology working to figure out how the lungs work — and in particular, what happens to the lungs under stress. Following a winding road that brought her from family medicine in a small mountain town in Canada to UC San Diego School of Medicine where she researches the effects of low oxygen and exercise on lung function, Hopkins’ interests all come back to her love of figuring out how things work. She studies high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), a unique condition that occurs only at high altitudes that causes the lungs to suddenly fill with liquid, and is trying to understand why HAPE is so easily reversible while other similar conditions in the clinic can be so deadly. In this episode, she talks with our intern Noah Lowy about her research and shares some insights into how athletic training and lung function are intertwined. Image: Pixabay

Sunny Smith, MD, is co-medical director of UC San Diego School of Medicine's Student-Run Free Clinic, a popular elective that offers free care for San Diego's underserved and provides a unique hand-on experience for doctors-in-training. One of Smith’s most cherished memories of her 20+ years with the clinic is the time the students crowdsourced funding to help an uninsured man get the prosthetic leg he needed to return to work. One of the best things about the clinic, she says, is the opportunity to be part of patients’ lives for years, getting to know them and their families. The clinic is a featured part of UC San Diego’s new T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. Learn more at health.ucsd.edu/compassion.

For most of history, scientific and medical studies have tended to involve primarily white people, and mostly white men. We now know those findings don’t always apply to people from different genetic and environmental backgrounds. That’s why the All of Us Research Program’s goal is to accelerate medical discoveries by gathering data on health, habits, family history, genetics and environment from one million or more participants — and particularly participants from historically underrepresented communities. At UC San Diego Health, All of Us is led by Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics. In this episode, she talks about the program, what she’s excited about and what’s coming next. Learn more at http://joinallofus.org.

In this episode we talk to Alan Shahtaji, DO, family and sports medicine physician at UC San Diego Health and a team doctor for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. We caught up with Shahtaji on the morning before he left to join up with the team and travel with them for the 2019 World Cup in France. He talks about what he does, what he likes about it and what’s challenging about providing medical care abroad for an elite team. He also shares some advice for anyone interested in staying healthy and performing well in soccer, including parents with kids getting into the sport. For more, check out Shahtaji’s video on how to prevent soccer injuries: https://youtu.be/03zwR5sBr1Q

Trey Ideker and Samson Fong teach a course at UC San Diego School of Medicine called Biological Networks and Biomedicine. It’s designed to introduce graduate students to the concept of network biology — living systems as an interconnected whole, instead of individual cells, proteins or genes — and the bioinformatics tools used to study these systems. But instead of giving the class a standard final exam, Ideker and Fong created a competition. The students worked in teams to analyze a database of patient genetic information and identify the genes most closely associated with schizophrenia. The top teams not only came up with a list of known schizophrenia-associated genes, they ran the analysis in under five minutes and outperformed previously published approaches. Learn more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424112921.htm

"Tiny ice skaters on your uterus" is how a patient with endometriosis describes the pain she lived with for nine years before being diagnosed. In this episode, Monica Cain shares her personal journey with the debilitating disorder, and Dr. Sanjay Agarwal talks about all things endometriosis, including the first new drug in a decade that is becoming a game changer.

In our previous episode on cancer survivorship, Michelle Brubaker shared her recent cancer journey. In this episode Laurie Knight, a licensed clinical social worker, and Cecilia Kasperick, breast cancer nurse navigator, of the Comprehensive Breast Health Center at UC San Diego Health, talk about how Michelle can move forward after treatment, without having her life defined by cancer. They offer tips for friends and family to help patients transition to survivorship and beyond. To learn more about Michelle's journey, check out her video at health.ucsd.edu/cancerstories.