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My name is Niraj Chavan. I am originally from Mumbai India and I am in the University of
Kentucky as a clinical fellow in the division of fetal medicine department of OB/GYN. Right
now we are in Dr. Pearson's lab in the department of pharmacology and nutritional sciences at
the University of Kentucky.
My lab experience and my lab experiments have typically been directed towards the field
of fetal programming which basically means trying to understand how various exposures
that happen to a baby as the baby is still in the uterus and trying to see how that actually
affects the long term growth and development. This is specifically very important when it
comes to public health problems such as diabetes or metabolic conditions that can actually
affect the long term growth and development and in the laboratory setting, we're trying
to understand how each of these various exposures that happen even before birth can actually
tell you or predict how you will do when you are growing up say five years hence, ten years
hence or even fifty years hence. And so the whole purpose of that laboratory experimental
setup is to try and simulate or recreate those scenarios and try and understand how we could
potentially actually change those in a favorable way so as to prevent disease in the long term,
decrease the incidence in obesity, decrease problems such as cardiac issues, morbidity
associated with cardiovascular disease and obesity and metabolic syndrome in the long
run by actually looking at what happens at the very beginning even before you are actually
born.
Being originally from Mumbai in India that's where I grew up and I did my medical school
training in Mumbai as well. I do come from a family which has inherently a science background
with my mother being a profession in biochemistry and my father as well having an original background
in biochemistry and life sciences but later on branching into the industrial and commercial
side of science and that being the case I was sort of motivated naturally, inherently
as my long term career option. I think what inspired me the most is the questions that
remain unanswered on a day to day basis. We see human disease in many forms and therefore
at the end of the day when you're trying to answer these questions and seeing is treatment
A better than treatment B or is there a way that we could prevent the medical condition
altogether and therefore have something that could be introduced as a preventive strategy.
Each of these various aspects of improving the human health experience is what science
inherently answers. I think the biggest achievement that I could say for the future of our world
is to gain national recognition and to be able to actually come up with remedies or
solutions that could actually help to change how health and disease is perceived in the
long run. How we could potentially bring in small little changes like for instance exercise
for pregnant women in the case of diabetes and if this could potentially help in preventing
long term diabetes in the neonates or in the offsprings. Such sort of easy to adapt and
easy to accommodate interventions, if we could come up with those and have these implemented
on a national basis and see if that can actually down the line fifteen, twenty, fifty years
later help to improve or decrease the burden of disease by that token.