Interview with Dr. Christina Chambers, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of Clinical Research for the Department of Pediatrics at UCSD and Rady Children's Hospital. Dr. Chambers is a perinatal epidemiologist, whose research is focused on environmental exposures and pregnancy and child health outcomes, including birth defects.
This podcast series is hosted by Patricia Kathleen and Wilde Agency Media. The series interviews women (& women/female-identified & non-binary) entrepreneurs, founders, and gurus across all industries to investigate those voices in business today. Both the platform and discussion are designed to further the global conversation in regards to the changing climate in entrepreneurial and founding roles.
TRANSCRIPTION
*Please note, this is an automated transcription please excuse any typos or errors
[00:00:07] Hi, my name is Patricia Kathleen, and this podcast series will contain interviews I conduct with female and female identified entrepreneurs, founders, co-founders, business owners and industry gurus. These podcasts speak with women and women, identified individuals across all industries in order to shed light for those just getting into the entrepreneurial game, as well as those deeply embedded within it histories, current companies and lessons learned are explored in the conversations I have with these insightful and talented powerhouses. The series is designed to investigate a female and female identified perspective in what has largely been a male dominated industry in the USA to date. I look forward to contributing to the national dialog about the long overdue change of women in American business arenas and in particular, entrepreneurial roles. You can contact me via my media company website Wild Dot Agency. That's why L d dot agency or my personal website. [00:01:19][72.2]
[00:01:20] Patricia Kathleen, dot com. Thanks for listening. Now let's start the conversation. [00:01:25][5.1]
[00:01:29] Hi, everyone, and welcome back. This is your host, Patricia, and today I am sitting down with Dr. Christina Chambers. She is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego and director of clinical research for the Department of Pediatrics at UCSD and Rady Children's Hospital. [00:01:45][15.5]
[00:01:46] Welcome, Christina. [00:01:46][0.5]
[00:01:49] Good, good morning or good afternoon, I guess, good afternoon. [00:01:52][2.9]
[00:01:52] I should mention that Dr. Chambers is contacting us over Zoome today. We're just so excited that she took time it all out of her busy schedule. I wanted to read a quick, quick bio on Dr. Chambers, as well as give you guys a roadmap for everyone listening regarding the structure of how today's chat will go so that you can refer back to it or skip ahead as needs be so quickly. A roadmap of today's podcast will first introduce Christina's academic background and brief professional life. Then we'll drop straight into her current position at the Center for Life Course Research and other pertinent information there. And then we'll unpack the center, the what the structure of the Center for Life Course research is and how it's structured, what its mission is, how it's set up, how it works, why it was developed, et cetera, et cetera. Then we'll get into the goals for the Center for Life Course research has over the next three years in any areas it might be changing in. And then we'll wrap up with advice that Christina may have for those looking to do what she does or get involved in all of the areas that she is involved in. [00:02:58][65.5]
[00:02:58] A quick bio on Dr. Chambers. She is a perinatal epidemiologist whose research is focused on environmental exposures and pregnancy and child health outcomes, including birth defects. She directs the Center Better Beginnings in the Department of Pediatrics at UCSD and is the program director of Mother to Baby California, which is a service providing individualized risk assessments regarding medications and other exposures for pregnant and breastfeeding women and their providers in the state of California. She is a founding principle investigator for the Vaccines and Medications in Pregnancy Surveillance Systems. The AMPAS, which is the first national system to evaluate medication and vaccine safety in human pregnancy and currently leads a number of nationwide studies of pregnancy outcomes following maternal exposures. She also has contributed to research on improved diagnosis, prevention and treatment for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Most recently, she established Mommy's Milk, a national research repository located at UC San Diego. The goal of mommy's milk is to collect breast milk samples from mothers who consent to participate, along with information about their infant's growth and development. This resource can be used by researchers throughout the world about the composition and benefits of human milk and whether or not medications or other exposures that the mother has transferred into her breast milk and how that may or may not affect her breastfed infant. [00:04:27][88.9]
[00:04:28] So that's a kind of an intense bio. And I really want to drop into I'm going to read the bio for the Center for Life Course Research as we come to it. But, Dr. Chambers, I would love to drop straight into your academic background and your brief professional life following that. [00:04:46][17.6]
[00:04:48] All right. So I've had sort of an unusual trajectory in terms of reading into academic life. So I had a career in business for many years, for about 20 years before sort of changing career paths and deciding a direction that I wanted to go. And actually, maybe a curious thing about it is how I really got interested in it was from a volunteer experience. So I started volunteering in the neonatal intensive care unit at UC San Diego on my day off. And and I also volunteered at a counseling service, the same one, this mother to baby that was mentioned in the bio that provides information to pregnant and breastfeeding women to help them know about or be careful about exposures they might have that could cause harm, but also to feel comfortable about ones that are are are likely safe. And it just hit a nerve with me that this was kind of the this the place in life where I wanted to be. So I went back to school, got a master's in public health, and then became pretty evident by the end of that. This was not enough. And so then I continued on to get a Ph.D. in public health epidemiology. And then that led to a faculty position at UC San Diego in the Department of Pediatrics. And so I've been doing this now for the last 20 years or so, working as my home department in pediatrics, but also, as you can probably tell from the bio, what what what I do and what my group does actually encompasses multiple. Specialty areas and particularly maternal health, and so we partner with reproductive health sciences at UC San Diego and elsewhere. I'm also engaged in global health, is doing some of this work in other countries and also engaged with the school of pharmacy with an appointment there as well, since many of the things that we focus on are medications. [00:07:14][145.6]
[00:07:15] Wonderful, and so when did you join the Center for a Life Course research, when it was created in twenty fifteen or after that? [00:07:24][8.9]
[00:07:25] Yes, yes, we founded it. [00:07:27][2.2]
[00:07:28] So this was a clinical translational research institute, as you know, from your investigation of how, say, sites are structured, are one at UC San Diego was already in existence, but there was a particular interest in by the P.I. Gary Firestein in trying to encompass pediatrics, as is an emphasis area in our story, but to make it sort of broader focused. And so it's in keeping with that theme, the idea of having a life course research center that encompassed the entire lifespan came up. And so I was asked to lead that and sort of founded that in two thousand fifteen. And it's continued to expand since then. [00:08:20][51.6]
[00:08:20] OK, and so for everyone listening in the audience, the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute or actor, we did a podcast with two of the head leader female over there, and we kind of unpacked what it was and what it does. So for anyone curious about learning more about the institute, you guys can get on and listen to that podcast. It's to Levine as well as Angela Gerstmann something anyway. But I wanted to kind of have you draw. So the A.I., is it is that the umbrella that the Center for Life Course Research is nestled under or do they run in tandem with one another? Because I know that you you utilize the actuary facilities for things like Mommy's milk. Is that correct? [00:09:05][45.0]
[00:09:07] Yes, so, yes, the Center for Course Research is under the umbrella of Bakhtiyari, so that's the sort of overarching infrastructure. [00:09:16][8.5]
[00:09:17] OK, and let me read a quick bio. It's taken directly from your website, but it's it's more well put than anything I can kind of summarize just for everyone listening. This Intercourse Center for Life Course Research at UC San Diego at actor, I was created in twenty fifteen to incorporate special populations and all age groups into research. [00:09:37][19.7]
[00:09:37] This integrated program is the first of its kind at UC San Diego and provides unique multidisciplinary opportunities to bring pediatricians neonatal new Nadol ologists internists, family medicine physicians and geriatric specialists together to study special populations and life course transitions. Broadly, Life Course Research investigates the long term effects of social, behavioral and biological biologic determinants of disease across the lifespan or across generations. Through the study of biologic pathways by which these determinants operate both independently and jointly, researchers strive to elucidate the origins and trajectories of disease through collaborations across multidisciplinary teams. Clinical researchers seek to bridge developmental transitions throughout the life course, enabling a continuum of care and investigation into biologic plasticity, fetal programing and critical periods of growth and development. Lifeforce research develops and incorporates methodologies specific to analytical techniques appropriate for modeling, repeat observations, HIROKU data, latent exposures and or multiple interactive effects. And so I understand. [00:10:50][73.0]
[00:10:52] And the facilities are so massive. We got into the wet lab and everything else and having these things. But can you now unpack for us the Center for Life Course Research, its mission we kind of just got into is to study through a collaboration, a multidisciplinary team, affect all of these different relationships. Can you kind of maybe suss out an example or something that you're working on right now to kind of bring that more to the surface of the audience and people listening? [00:11:22][30.5]
[00:11:25] Sure, yeah, I think it's become apparent over the last couple of decades. Many people are kind of familiar with the Barker hypothesis that there are things that happened early in life or even prenatal life, such as your growth, birth weight, that seemed to be pretty strong predictors of things that don't pop up or occur until 40, 50, 60 years later. So risk for diabetes or for obesity or for cardiovascular disease, that's that that sort of trajectory may be set up very early on in life. And so that kind of lens in mind, there are a lot of people in the world who have been interested in you. Research tends to be done in in little, you know, small blocks of time. So that's how NIH funds research typically in five year blocks of time or even shorter, and that oftentimes you're doing research on a population at a snapshot in time so that you're really not looking at things that could have led to whatever you're looking at now in terms of a health outcome that occurred 20, 30 years ago and everything else along the way. And nor are you looking forward in terms of what what you know up to that point, what that might predict in the future. So by taking this kind of life course approach and this applies across all health sciences, the thinking is that you can get a much better handle on what combinations of factors and what inflection points do things head off in one direction versus another. So why is it that one person develops cancer and another doesn't? Why is it that the person develops Alzheimer's disease and another doesn't? Where are those inflection points? And you mentioned in the bio plasticity. So we know that there are periods in time that if you did this thing differently, that it might change the entire trajectory for the for the rest of the of your life. So what is it about cognitive aging, the the the rapidity with which that happens or the slowness with which that happens? One of the things that could contribute to that and in the reality of it, is that if you ideally had every piece of information about everybody you were studying from day zero to 100 years of age, that would be wonderful. But that's usually a cost barrier time barrier to gathering this information. So there are people that have worked on developing methods to be able to kind of reconstruct the life course with pieces of it that you have available at different times. So it's an evolving methodology to be thinking about longitudinal trajectories and what happens if you, you know, one thing happens at one time point versus another. But that's one of the goals of the of the center, is to help clinical researchers to adopt and become comfortable with these methods in thinking about their research questions, not in a vacuum, but what are the combination of factors that could have contributed to what they're seeing now and what will what will happen in the future? And ultimately, that will help inform the best interventions, the best recommendations for how people may have a better health over the trajectory of life. I think the center being located in A.I. is perfect because as you've heard in the previous podcast, the cry infrastructure is intended to be able to support clinical research by training the workforce, by providing facilities to expert assistance and biostatistics and clinical research coordinators and so on, and by helping with study design and methods that all of those things are a goal of all of the clinical and translational science awards, including the one at UC San Diego. So we fit right in with that like a glove in terms of being able to take this life course approach and applying training to the workforce, helping people with methodology, improving skill level and being able to design studies and and interpret them at the same time as you think of this life course. Trajectory and approaches to conducting research that in that way, it brings up exactly the questions that arise at what I mentioned, inflection points there, particular transition times in life that are seems to be incredibly important. They're vulnerable for health. And so prenatal life and birth is a major transition time. Another one is adolescence into adulthood. Another one is in middle life until until the aging population and then end of life. And so what we have done in the Center for Life Course research is make sure that we've involved clinical researchers at each aspect of those transition time points so that we can sort of knit together how those all play a part along a person's lifespan. So we have a we have a steering committee. We have the Center for Life Course Research has a structure with me serving as the director and co directors that involve Andrea Lacroix, who is a world renowned specialist in women's health and and aging. And we have another epidemiologist, Gretchen Bandele, who's a specialist in early childhood and child diversity. And we have a person who's involved in middle life research as well. And then we have a group of advisors or consultants who are faculty members or students at UC San Diego who kind of follow what we're what activities we're engaging in over the course of the year and provide us with feedback and and suggestions about directions that we might pursue across the campus or across different campuses, including other cities. So that includes the chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego. Dr. Cheryl Andersen includes Dr. Jeannie Wong, who is a pediatric gastroenterologist who has made great strides in developing transition care programs to help children as they move into adolescence. Be able to begin to take responsibility for their health conditions as they move out from parents providing guidance for them, and then transition into being able to manage their health care and their diseases and their treatment effectively as they move into adult care. And this is this is recognized as a critical transition period for health, just general health, but certainly for children who have chronic serious conditions as they move into adult care. So I sort of given you a broad overview here of what the center does. We've done part of our education mission. We've conducted some life course focused symposia. So some of them are focused on a particular exposure. So we did a very well attended one last year on Kanavis across the life course, maybe two years ago, where we looked at what's known or not known about prenatal effects of cannabis, what's known or not known about adolescent use of cannabis. We looked at it in terms of information and work that's being done here about driving under the influence. And then we looked at it in the aged. So people in geriatrics who are looking at cannabis use and health benefits and health effects. So it was sort of an all encompassing on a specific exposure. We did a method's workshop where we had the top people in the field of life course research from the UK who have been following actually a cohort of higher population of people born in a specific city 70 years ago. They've been following them with repeated visits all of that time. And so they did a sort of training with the audience on how that was done and what methods they developed and and were able to apply there. And we've we've done one on successful aging or aging across the life course because aging doesn't begin when you're 60 or 70. It begins from day one. So and that brought in top researchers in aging research and epigenetics and so on to kind of look at this across the spectrum. So those are kind of some of the activities that we've engaged in. [00:21:20][595.5]
[00:21:21] Yeah, I mean, it's such a it's a labyrinth for me is. [00:21:23][2.4]
[00:21:23] Actually, thinking about it when you deal with longevity studies or life course research, as you're calling it, the I wonder when you get into you mentioned the you know, the biologic plasticity that the program has and the transitional times that you kind of set up to research and look at, I think about all of the research being done with triggers, you know, or things that are called triggers during transitional times, the onset of adolescent diabetes, for instance, things of that nature, type one diabetes. But I wonder, do you have like a framework? I feel like it's kind of like looking at the human genome. Twenty years ago, you know, when they captured and said, great, and we have no idea what to do with all this information. Do you provide this? Yeah, exactly right. It's wonderful to have. Now, what do we do? It's kind of boiling it down and really getting some some interesting cross sections to kind of compare and contrast and suss out some of these more important, crucial features. Do you have you provide a framework? You were saying you've got the steering committee for structure and these advisors and consultants of staff and faculty. But do you at the Center for the Life Course Research, do you guys provide kind of this boilerplate of how everyone's going to come at it? Or is it is it just taken on a piece by piece, experiment by experiment, study by study basis as to what people will be analyzing just because the factors are so major and of course, research? Do you have everyone look at transition times? Who comes into work with it or how does that work? [00:22:56][92.7]
[00:22:58] Yeah, so it depends on your study design, but I think but the kind of overarching principles and things to take into consideration, those would be Kofman no matter what time point you're actually starting to capture captured data. But it gives you sort of a focus in terms of thinking about, well, if I'm here and I'm going to capture these data in planning phase to be thinking about what are other important things that I would want to have knowing that I'm looking at this through this once. So we've done this a couple of ways. One is we initiated a couple of years ago a graduate level course for clinical researchers and PhD students and so on who want to learn the general methods and an approach to doing this. And so there we do. It's a sort of a seminar series that has a biostatistics focus to it. So what are the analytical methods that are used, but also some example, researchers who work in this area who who will present on their longitudinal cohort that was looking at whatever nutrition and and how a life course research methods were applied. What were the considerations they took into place, took into account? If they had to do over, what would they have done differently? So I think that approach has been taken. We've also disseminated or made available the as a kind of training video of the talks that were given at that symposia seminar that I told you about, where the group came over from UK. So that's broken down into some sections and available for anyone who wants to actually kind of go through a few hours of training on how to do this and what the what the pitfalls are or not. We also will consult on an individual basis. So if somebody has this study they're putting together, it's not only what's the study design, but the sort of general study design principles like are you have you attended to these transition periods or these vulnerable periods or triggers, as you mentioned? Are you are you able to get the appropriate kind of representative population? Is your length of follow up adequate for the research questions that you're trying to answer so we can either provide ourselves or make connections with clinical researchers who need that kind of advice? If you're if there's a special population that should be included in your study or you want to include, how do you how do you tap into that special population, whether it's a vulnerable population or underserved or it's a group of people that might typically be harder to attract to participate in research. So those are all kinds of consulting services that we can provide. And then we also provide data sets, not the datasets themselves, but linkage to datasets that already exist. And that's a tremendous resource. So on our Life Course website within SETI, we're building a library. And so we have a library with links of. Existing longitudinal cohort study, so these studies that have collected data over time and it could be it could be a study that's about asthma or it could be a study that's about diabetes. The point is to say here are some existing cohorts where some of them have biological samples, some of them don't. Some of them cover 10 years or some of them cover a shorter period of time. And here's the description of the dataset. Here's the person who is responsible for the data set you can contact to see if you can use this or some of them are publicly available. Data sets like the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that you can just apply to get without having to go through an investigator. So that's a resource for people who want to do secondary analysis. So sometimes it doesn't require you have a question and it doesn't require that you go out and recruit, spend five billion dollars to recruit new people. You actually can test your hypothesis in existing data looking at a novel question. And then we just recently put up added to the library bio repository samples. The first ones that went up were pediatric samples, where an investigator may have collected cerebrospinal fluid for a study or they may have collected blood for looking at a biomarker for onset of diabetes or something like that. And if they had consented, the participants and collected the samples appropriately to be able to use them for future uses. Then with that proper ethics approval and the investigators agreement that I have left over sample, I would be interested in talking to anybody who wants to collaborate. We've listed those in the library as well. So that's an opportunity for somebody who says, I'm here. I want to know if this biomarker would be a good one for me to incorporate into my study. Maybe you can do some pilot work with existing data much more efficiently and at less cost. And that pairs up investigators who might not otherwise have talked to each other, known that this resource existed exactly online and diversify sample collection. [00:28:41][343.3]
[00:28:42] I mean, there's so many things that libraries like that do. I mean, the amount of time and money they're in saved is amazing. [00:28:49][7.5]
[00:28:50] And like you're talking about this, this whole new level of collaboration, you know, bumping into an unsuspected individual with the proverbial water cooler, so to speak, and getting back. Amazing. I kind of want to use that and transition into what you are. I'm fascinated and taken with them on this project, and I'd love to know a little bit more about that. I haven't I haven't been on the wire for knowing a lot about public health projects and things of that nature, particularly in light, of course, research. But I don't think that there has been enough research done over like life course research and studying, you know, human breast milk and things of that nature. Can you talk about when you established mommy's milk and the data collection point you're at at this point? And if you started to examine different. [00:29:41][50.9]
[00:29:43] Sure, so we started this in 2014 and it and luckily engaged the interest of A.I. and collaborating on this as a unique resource that from the sort of an infrastructural standpoint, would float the boat of a lot of research questions. So kind of going back to the beginning, here's this liquid gold, as people call it, the source of nutrition that is supposed to be the sole source of nutrition for an infant up to six months of age. And this is worldwide. So it's incredibly important to know something about this thing that sustains life for the first few months of life for most babies in the world. And yet, amazingly, we know very little about it. It's kind of when I started to learn about this, that the idea that in talking with nutritionists that we don't have recommended daily allowances for nutritional intake for babies under two because they're supposed to be breastfed. And we don't really know the variability in nutritional content of breast milk across the world or under different circ*mstances if the mother has a chronic condition, those sorts of things. So that's kind of a basic question. We know lots of mothers need to be able to express breast milk and feed the baby from a bottle. They go to work some time in the after after delivery and have to be able to feed their babies that way. We don't know a whole lot about the optimum conditions under which to store milk, how long can it stay frozen and so on. And then we are also very interested in looking at what are the components in milk in addition to the nutritional components that just happen because you're living in the world. So, you know, we've published out of this dataset looking at what are the contaminants that come from fish. So we know that mercury and sometimes in fish is at higher levels and some types of fish. And there are reasons, certainly in pregnancy, that you don't want to eat high mercury containing fish because it might have a neurotoxic effect on the developing baby. But is there are those same types of toxins found in breast milk from mothers who consume certain types of fish or large amounts of it? And could those in turn have an impact on the baby? We're learning there are plenty of other things in breast milk. So as you start to you as a adult woman, have had a lifetime of exposure, some of which are things that get stored in your fat or your bone, and they start to get released during pregnancy and lactation. And so it's are some of those things that maybe you had exposure to a pesticide, you know, 10 years ago that got stored in fat. And as you start to release those fat cells during the breastfeeding period, is that ending up in breast milk? And if it does, does it make a difference? Does it have any impact on the baby? Me personally, because of my interest in exposures to medications and other substances, we deal with this every day that women will say I breastfeeding and my doctor tells me I have to take this antibiotic or I have to take this medication for my rheumatoid arthritis or whatever and know nobody's tested milk to see how much of the drug gets in there. And I'm really worried about this. So I'm going to stop breastfeeding or they turn around and say I'm supposed to take my asthma medication, but I'm really worried because there's not information about how much of the drug gets into breast milk. And I don't want my baby to get any, so I'm not going to take my asthma medication. Neither of those is the optimum solution. They're both bad solutions. So so and the reason that people are making these decisions, pediatricians and women, are because they don't have the data and the data is not that difficult to get. So that was a major reason for establishing this breast milk repository to kind of float the boat of lots of people with different research questions around the world and then focus on looking at substances and medications and so on in breast milk and then following those babies up. So we start in 2014. We we cannot handle the number of people who are interested in joining. So we have about sixteen hundred women enrolled. They each give about 50 milliliters up to a full expression. And they can either do this here in San Diego or we said. [00:34:42][299.1]
[00:34:42] The market and they collect it and send it back to us by FedEx and they also graciously, after consent, answer a whole bunch of questions about the circ*mstances around breast feeding, how long they've been doing it, how often they do it, whether they're supplementing with formula, whether the baby's getting any solid food, whether they breast fed a previous child and all of that sort of stuff. And then a number of questions about how the baby's doing. And then a 14 day history of every medication, every vaccine, every vitamin and mineral, herbal product, alcohol, tobacco, anything that they've had exposure to over those 14 days. We capture that. And then they also fill in questionnaires about anxiety and stress. They do a food frequency questionnaire about their diet, exercise habits, and then they allow us to be able to have their doctor send us medical records. And that way we can follow the growth of the baby over time. And then we send them questionnaires about development so they get every few months they get a questionnaire, standard measures of developmental screening, and then for a subset, they actually get face to face testing. So kind of an example, when we published last year in Pediatrics, was that kind of the first paper out there at all, looking at the amount of THC that's measurable in breast milk for mothers who are frequent cannabis users, marijuana users. And so we were able, working with the School of Pharmacy to show that over half of the samples that women gave us, where they reported any use in the last 14 days, you could actually detect measurable levels of THC. And of course, that was the higher the the the fewer number of hours since the last use, the higher the measured level, which sort of stands to reason and small quantities compared to what an adult would have in their bloodstream. But the question is, does that make a difference? And so now we're following up. We've expanded the sample and we're following up those children to see does it does it make a difference? Maybe it doesn't at all, or maybe it does that above a certain dose. But being able to know what the answer is to that question so people can be appropriately advised, we think is is really important. [00:37:08][146.1]
[00:37:09] And what markers are you looking for? Simply gross or which markers are you looking for? I mean, are you looking up until the age of two and are you looking for physiological or I mean, are you any type of disease? [00:37:25][15.8]
[00:37:26] Yeah. [00:37:26][0.0]
[00:37:27] OK, yeah. Both So. So there's a four breasted infant. There's a World Health Organization has sort of normal growth curves for boys and girls. And so we're looking at how if a mother has a certain exposure or she has other things we're looking at is microbiome and so on, is there some difference in that mom's child's growth trajectory compared to the child who doesn't the breast milk doesn't have those characteristics. So, yes, that that's one one thing. And then in terms of the child health outcomes, it's it's not only growth, which is a really strong predictor of development, but also screening on meeting developmental milestones like language development, communicative skills, motor skills. Is the child speaking words, screening for autism spectrum disorders that can be done pretty early. And then the as the children get older and the follow up, actually, women are when they consent to enroll in the study, we say we are going to ask you to continue to be followed up with your child coming in up to about four to five years of age. But they consent for all future uses and for us to be able to contact them if something else comes up. So the face to face testing, whether it's actually a psychiatrist who comes to test the child and the mom, and it's more diagnostic that's done when the children are late preschool age. So around three to five. [00:39:05][98.4]
[00:39:06] And what's the duration of the study? So you said six or three to five. [00:39:10][3.6]
[00:39:12] Yeah. So what we would like to have moms do is stay in the study from the time they enroll and they don't have to be breastfeeding a newborn. They could be breastfeeding a child who's two. Most women enroll in the first twelve months of their child's life, but we will take them any time. [00:39:30][18.1]
[00:39:31] And that and then from that point forward, our sort of standard follow up between three and five years of age. And then if there was having established the cohort, if. There's reason to or specific question, since they've given permission for us to recontact them, it would be possible to do longer term follow up. So kind of going back to the life course issue there, would you be able to say, you know, 10 years from now, is there an increased risk of onset of obesity in adolescents? Had these characteristics of your of your personal. [00:40:09][38.0]
[00:40:10] Yeah, and I think, again, the power of these studies, I mean, I think it hit me most twenty five years ago in my undergraduate career. [00:40:17][7.3]
[00:40:17] But looking at life, of course, research and longevity studies, it's kind of the only way we get some really powerful ideas about time is such a major factor that we don't play into lot with a lot of our analysis, critical medical analysis, I think. [00:40:32][14.7]
[00:40:33] And really quickly, I know we're running out of time, but I wanted to look towards do you are there any goals that Life Course research the Center for Life Course Research has over the next three years or any areas that it's thinking about changing or diversifying in? [00:40:46][12.9]
[00:40:48] Yeah, we we touched a little bit on vulnerable populations. I'm really that's one of the the areas that we want to be able to focus on, not only inclusiveness, but ways that things might the conclusions that you might draw from a study. As you know, you want representativeness, but conclusions that you might draw from a study that excludes vulnerable populations because they might be difficult to enroll in the study. And if you if you're coming drawing a conclusion that doesn't apply to that vulnerable population, well, what do you have? So you've lost the ability to be able to have it be generalizable to the people you would like to be able to provide that to. [00:41:35][47.0]
[00:41:35] So that's an area that we're going to focus on. And one of our kind of advisors is to that end is a medical student doing a PhD program here at UCSD who's Native American and very, very, very passionate about policy as it relates to health and health research in that population. And traditionally, for many good reasons, have have had barriers to wanting to engage in clinical research, clinical trials to everything else. So we think that that's an opportunity area for us that we can make a difference in. Certainly in San Diego and here, San Diego has a very diverse population. But are there vulnerable populations that are just not being included in research? Because it's more difficult, because they're barriers we have just haven't addressed? [00:42:34][58.2]
[00:42:35] Absolutely. Well, I like the idea of of getting into vulnerable populations for perspective in general. But I think it's a good goal, too, especially given that you've got so much data coming in on things like Mommy's milk. [00:42:48][13.6]
[00:42:49] And so I know that you you know, if someone's looking to kind of study what you're doing or get involved in some of these things, either as a participant or just research, they can contact the Center for Life, Life Course Research or try and kind of suss out, you know, Dr. Christina Chambers and contact her that way. However, I'm looking for if you if you ran into a young female or female identified individual and who is who said, listen, I just got done doing some volunteer work, I think I'm going to head in to get a master's in public health. You know, I'm really taken with these populations of the infant neonatal care unit that I've been doing with the top three pieces of advice you would give her moving forward in her in her future. [00:43:40][50.7]
[00:43:42] Yeah, so I love talking to people that are at that point in their life, and I guess what I like to tell my story, because it's not a traditional pathway. And I think I, I, I think it's when you're thinking of your career path, it's not a career path. This is a life course, you know, message in and of itself. [00:44:08][26.0]
[00:44:09] Career path doesn't sit in isolation. [00:44:10][1.3]
[00:44:11] You know, it's everything else that's going on in your life and what you're postponing in order to choose this way of going and, you know, things that come up and hit you in the face that you didn't expect were going to happen. So I think that that that takes somebody, you know, especially a young person who's making those decisions about career path. I say it's an incredibly exciting area. And if you have the passion for it, you go forward recognizing. I think it's important to keep in mind that it's it's never all she wrote. So what you think is your plan this month that two years from now could go a completely different direction and that you the best thing I think you can do is to be open to opportunities as they arise. You don't want to get, you know, scattered, but to be thinking of kind of where your opportunities lead you in a direction that feels right and consistent with what you want to do and also recognizing that you're going to be diverted along the path one way or another. That's going to happen. And I guess the second thing would be look to who you admire. And so if you think this is something you like to do, find somebody or two people or three people that you may know or not know who you think have kind of reached the peak or epitome of what you would like to be and then look at what it took for them to get to that point. And it's not always that you have to go the pathway of, oh, you have to do this by this time, this by this time and this by this time in order to be winning the Nobel Prize by 50, there's many pathways to get to a way where you can make a difference and and be fulfilled in your career. And that's, you know, having the the creative openness to that, I think is important for anyone kind of embarking on a career in public health. [00:46:22][130.1]
[00:46:22] Absolutely. So we've got career path does not sit in isolation. If you have passion, go forward, be amenable to change and look to who you admire. [00:46:31][9.0]
[00:46:32] And not all career paths are the same. I was in Stockholm, Sweden, a couple of months ago, which is the birthplace of the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel established it there and I went to the Nobel Prize Museum and they gave my six year old Nobel Prize made of chocolate for finding all of the hidden gems in the museum. So there's another route to go. If one's looking for a Nobel and it seems unattainable lifetime. There's a chocolate bar in Stockholm. I want to I love it so much. I really appreciate you taking this hour out of your day. I know that you are so busy and it's a you know, you are in a very intricate and beautiful web of deep knowledge and information. And I applaud you for dealing with my very novice and naive introspection into what you're doing. [00:47:23][50.9]
[00:47:24] Not at all. No. I appreciate your questions. And you're taking an interest in this and being and taking the dives to go in and and look at it closely. So appreciate that opportunity. [00:47:34][10.1]
[00:47:35] Absolutely. [00:47:35][0.0]
[00:47:35] I believe there's a lot of shared pathways and bridges between entrepreneurship and female founders and and what what's happening with everything at the Center for a Life Course research. So everyone who's thinking that you've got something that could be in tandem, jump online and you can go through actory San Diego or the Center for Life Course Research at UC San Diego and get all of the information you need there. Thank you once again, Dr. Chambers, and I hope to coerce you in talking to me again sometime in the future podcast. [00:48:11][35.3]
[00:48:12] Sure. All right. I look forward to it. Thank you. And for everyone listening, thank you for giving me your time. [00:48:17][5.7]
[00:48:18] And until we speak again, remember to always bet on yourself, Slainte. [00:48:18][0.0]
[2837.7]
