Dr. Dawn Newcomb and graduate student Nowrin Chowdhury challenged each other to a game of Uno while we asked them some questions about their research.
Interested in their research? Read more here:
Sex and gender in asthma - European Respiratory Review 2021
Video Transcript:
Dawn - Hi, I’m Dawn Newcomb. I’m an associate professor of medicine and I've been at Vanderbilt here for 15 years with my own lab for about 10 of those.
Nowrin - I’m Nowrin Chowdhury. I am a 5th-year MSTP student. So I'm doing an MD/PhD and I’m in Dawn Newcomb’s lab in the Molecular Pathology and Immunology program.
[Q: What does your lab study?]
D - My lab studies how sex hormones affect the immune system and why women are more likely than men to have certain diseases including asthma and autoimmune diseases.
[Q: How long have you been in Nashville?]
N - I have been here five years now.
D - I've been here for 14 years/15 years. So before Nashville was cool.
[Q: Explain your thesis in one sentence.]
N - My thesis research is basically how the sex hormone testosterone can influence T-cell metabolism, specifically TH2 and TH17 metabolism in asthma.
[Q: What is a T-cell?]
N - So a T-cell is part of your adaptive immune system meaning the part of your immune system that kicks in after you've had an infection. T-cells in general will learn about a certain protein and then react to it constantly and cause those symptoms of asthma.
[Q: What are the major differences between men and women when it comes to asthma?]
D - What we found so far is that testosterone decreases immune cell responses and this is important since boys have a higher prevalence of asthma early in life but as they age their asthma rates go down, whereas women as adults have a higher prevalence of asthma.
[Q: Least favorite board game?]
D - Balderdash! it's the one we have to pick if it's a real word or not but they're all hard words and I don't know what any of them are.
N - Monopoly. I feel that that’s a popular opinion!
[Q: If you could be any pipettor, which would you be and why?]
D - I would be a multi-channel 200 because it's the most useful.
N - That’s what I was going to say!
[Q: Does socioeconomic status impact asthma rates?]
D - We do know that asthma disproportionately affects minority populations as well as people with socio-economic disadvantages in urban neighborhoods. The other thing that plays a part is comorbidities such as obesity, particularly in the female population.
[Q: What made you study sex differences in asthma?]
D - I was just very interested in trying to determine why there was this switch in asthma. I've done asthma research for about 20 years.
N - For me, I have always been very interested in how the immune system functions and dysfunctions. My family has a lot of autoimmune diseases so I was always interested in how that worked. And then Dawn was really awesome so.
D - Just not good at Uno!