Growing up, Faith Anderson wanted to be a veterinarian. She started her undergraduate studies at the University of Rhode Island as a biology major, but she added a second major in psychology after an introductory course sparked her interest in the human mind and the human condition. Another course on physiological psychology cemented her interest in neuroscience.

“Neuroscience combines biology and psychology,” Anderson explained. “It looks at how neural networks in the brain may be involved in behavior. It also focuses on the cellular level, studying the neurons and other brain cells, and even zooming into the molecular level, looking at molecules and proteins inside these cells and how they interact.” 

Anderson went to Dartmouth College’s molecular and systems biology program to conduct her doctoral research on the cellular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease. She also won the coveted John W. Strohbehn Medal for Excellence in Biomedical Research.

As graduation approached, an advisor introduced Anderson to exposomics, which explores environmental exposures and their effects on health, disease, and development, and she enrolled in the Exposome Boot Camp led by Gary Miller, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a Data Science Institute executive committee member. The two-day intensive included seminars and hands-on analytical sessions to provide an overview of concepts, techniques, and data analysis methods used in studies of the exposome.

“[The exposome] is like the environmental equivalent of the genome—the totality of your environmental exposures and the resulting biologic outcomes and consequences,” Anderson said.  

Today, as a postdoctoral research fellow in Miller’s lab, Anderson applies her background in neuroscience to explore how the environment affects neurodegenerative disease. One of her current projects explores transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and investigates how long—how many generations down—disease risk from exposure may last.

“Say your grandmother is exposed to DDT, a now banned insecticide used commonly from the 1940s to 1960s,” she said. “Would that confer increased risk to her child, and then to you as her grandchild?”

Anderson conducts this research with C. elegans, a tiny worm often used to study disease. She exposes the organism to toxicants and examines the effects over multiple generations.

Anderson also investigates the connection between dopamine and Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by loss of dopamine neurons. This project looks at the effects of environmental chemicals that may alter the dopamine system, including drugs, pesticides, industrial solvents, and heavy metals, to see how dopamine is disrupted and how that affects the health of treated cells. She studies dopamine dynamics and cell death using human cells in a petri dish.  

“When you’re doing such narrow, focused work, it can be easy to lose track of the big picture,” Anderson said. “But then I think about how research into a tiny protein, like the ones associated with inflammatory diseases like Parkinson’s disease, can help identify a good target for therapeutics and medical treatments, leading to medical intervention and healing.”

— Karina Alexanyan, Ph.D.