Amonae Dabbs-Brown

Background

About Amonae Dabbs-Brown

It took only 12 years of lab work performing everything from PCR to ELISA to GC-MS for me to realize, I much prefer analyzing to measuring biomolecules. So, like many, I made a career pivot during 2020 and have only looked back to draw inspiration from my past. I have now been a bioinformatician for over 2 years and it is by far the most rewarding job I have ever had. Whereas, as a biochemist, I would create methods to measure various biomolecules, as a bioinformatician, I am able to connect those measurements to real people and analyze how they are influenced by and interact with an individual’s genetics. For my entire adult life, I have been told that I am deficient in vitamin D, despite spending the better part of every evening and weekend outside playing rugby. While I don’t doubt that more vitamin D may be beneficial, I have always taken that recommendation with a grain of salt because I know that it was made based on what’s normal for light-skinned individuals. As a black woman, I have to keep in mind that most health-related recommendations are based on people who may have very different underlying genetics, and I see that more and more with every multi-ancestry study that I complete.Being a bioinformatician and working in public health makes me feel like I’m helping to close that gap in healthcare. My research in type 2 diabetes complications among different ancestry groups has already identified variants that, while common in people of African and Hispanic ancestry, are virtually absent in people of European descent. In performing sex-stratified analyses, I have been able to identify variants that are associated with diseases in one sex but not the other. Prior to this, only through my volunteer work did I ever feel so fulfilled and like I was making an actual difference in people’s lives. I look forward to continuing to serve historically underrepresented populations in whatever the next step of my bioinformatics career may be.