Marina Watowich ’15 researches environmental influences on health

If you were to pin down an example of how personal and interdisciplinary exploration can combine to inform important scientific work, Marina Watowich ’15 would be a great candidate. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, Watowich studies how environmental factors influence health outcomes.

“Really what I study is how environmental factors mechanistically influence the aging process,” said Watowich. “People don’t age in exactly the same way or at similar rates. This has led me to ask, ‘What are the reasons underlying why people age differently?’”

Aging might seem like something completely internal and individual, caused by predetermined genetic factors. The environment also has an influence, however; something researchers didn’t begin to understand until recently. 

“For example, following major natural disasters, we see a higher rate of hospitalizations for some cardiovascular diseases,” said Watowich. “Mechanistically, we really don’t understand why that is.” 

Watowich was motivated to study environmental influences on health outcomes not just out of academic interest, but also personal experience. Growing up in Houston, Texas, Watowich frequently experienced hurricanes. Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, right before Watowich started graduate school at the University of Washington, causing her to delay her move to Seattle to help clean up damage. 

“I was very personally motivated to understand if there were any detectable effects on the immune system from these natural disasters,” said Watowich. 

She took on this question directly in graduate school, researching how natural disasters affected aging of the immune system in rhesus macaques. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a category four storm, also in 2017, it created an opportunity to study its effects on a population of rhesus macaques that had been studied continuously on a nearby island.

Watowich and her collaborators found that the biological age of the macaques was accelerated by two years after the hurricane, which corresponds to seven to eight years in a human lifespan. 

This work led Watowich to her current postdoctoral research in the Lea Lab at Vanderbilt University. She’s continued to study environmental determinants of aging, but this time in humans. Watowich and the lab have teamed up with long-term studies of subsistence-level populations in Malaysia, Kenya, and Bolivia to understand the influence of environmental changes like urbanization on health outcomes. 

“These are populations that generally practice a traditional lifestyle, either traditional pastoralism or traditional hunting and gathering, but — due to a myriad of forces — are increasingly experiencing industrialization and integration into the market economy. That is causing a ton of changes to their environment,” said Watowich. “We can then study the aging process across this gradient of people who live a traditional lifestyle to people who live in these highly urban settings to see what differences there are at the molecular level. Within-population studies are more powerful in many ways than comparing subsistence-level groups to places like the U.S.” 

A major component of that work is actively coordinating with and giving back to their Indigenous community partners. 

“We’re aware of the history of how many Indigenous or subsistence-level communities have been taken advantage of,” said Watowich. “These are long-term collaborations where our science is informed by the community interests and we’re working to provide people with some tangible outcome.” That includes free health care and addressing research questions guided by the desires of the community.

The day-to-day work of Watowich’s research includes computational work, data analysis, writing papers and grants, meeting with collaborators, mentoring students, and occasional field and wet lab work.

Given Watowich’s clear passion for her work, her route to get there was surprisingly non-linear. She studied biology at Carleton, but didn’t do much research during her time on campus. “I was much more into playing Frisbee and wilderness education,” she said.

After graduation, Watowich worked as a fisheries observer on crab fishing boats in the Bering Sea. 

“I had a lot of questions about the biology of these systems that I was observing,” Watowich said. “I saw very quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to direct the scientific questions, so I decided to pivot and go to grad school, where I would be able to guide the science I was performing.”

Once in graduate school, Watowich planned on studying “hard-core ecology,” but her path shifted again as she discovered an interest in genomics and found her place in the field of molecular ecology, using genomics as a tool to study ecology.

Watowich says the twisting path to her research is something she wouldn’t change. 

“The odd jobs I did between graduation and going to grad school, I wouldn’t trade for anything. I mean, I’m never going to live on a fishing boat in the Bering Sea again,” she said. “I see students all the time worried about not going into grad school immediately, but I think there’s so much to be gained by taking a few years.”

“The accumulation of one’s experiences can and will inform your unique interests and position to do research,” she added. “Those experiences will lead you somewhere. Some of the most creative scientists I know took a non-classical path.”

Watowich is keeping that open-mindedness as she looks to the future, considering faculty positions but also excited about biotech companies that are looking at the molecular basis of aging. “Anything that allows me the creativity to investigate biology,” she said.

What Watowich loves most about her work is the freedom of exploration, so it makes sense that this would bleed into her everyday life.

“I never run out of questions about biology that are fascinating,” she said, “and having those moments of discovery — that’s really fun.”