One’s ideas must be as broad as nature if they are to interpret nature.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Featured Work
Unseen scars of childhood trauma
“Kids are resilient,” right? Maybe so, but the adaptations bodies make to cope with chronic or repeated trauma come with a cost. Twenty years after the groundbreaking Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study found a dose-dependent relationship between ACEs and health problems in adulthood, researchers are trying to measure and intercept biological responses to ACEs during childhood. Read about their efforts in Knowable Magazine.
Big Data for Small Babies
What exactly causes some women to go into labor too early? Scientists are looking for clues in pregnant moms’ immune systems and microbiomes. Read about how they’re using artificial intelligence/machine learning to make sense of huge amounts of data in the Science News feature.
Just the Messenger
What if we could skip the drugs and give our cells genetic instructions to treat diseases and protect from infection? For this Nature Medicine story, I spoke to scientists engineering a molecule called messenger RNA to do just that.
Commensal Menace
Could our own gut bacteria turn our immune cells against us? For this story in The Scientist magazine, I dove into how microbiota could provide a signal that tips the balance toward autoimmune disease.
Better Together – The “Quantum Theory” of Cancer Treatment
For this Nova Next story, I dove into the history of a little-known side effect of cancer radiation therapy that may just be the boost immunotherapy needs to finish off solid tumors. (Runner up for the 2017 AACR June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism)
Shedding Light on Rare Disease Genomics
As it becomes easier and cheaper to sequence entire genomes, families of children with rare diseases are finally getting the answers they’ve been hoping for. Learn more in my piece for The Scientist magazine.
The genetic shortcut to antibody drugs
As outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases become more common, researchers are seeking faster and cheaper ways to treat infections they know little about. Read about their new approaches in this Nature Outlook piece.
Should You Screen Your Child for Celiac Disease?
In this piece for The New York Times Parenting, I detail how clinicians, researchers, and parents are weighing the pros and cons of screening kids for a disease that is still often missed for far too long.
amanda b. keener 