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Alexander Red Eagle
Alexander Red Eagle’s memories of high school chemistry are more than the usual balancing of equations and bubbling of test tubes. His chemistry teacher in Long Beach, California, taught students that chemistry changes lives.
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Alexander Red Eagle
Stanford University School of Medicine
Palo Alto, California
Research Field: Genetics
Photo: Barbara Ries
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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“Because of her, I became a biochemistry major at UCLA,” says Red Eagle, 24, a Native American. Then, as now, he realized that the biochemical underpinnings of genetic research hold promise for fighting diabetes, heart disease, and other health conditions that disproportionately affect the Native American community.
Today, Red Eagle is an M.D./Ph.D. student in genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. He’s come a long way from the low-income Long Beach, California, neighborhood where he grew up. As his friends began to get in trouble and drop out of school, Red Eagle looked for a way out. His parents moved him to a middle school in a safer part of the city. He graduated from there to an honors high school and then moved on to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became president of the school’s American Indian Student Association.
After his senior year, Red Eagle earned a summer research fellowship in HHMI’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers disadvantaged students, including underrepresented minorities, the chance to do research in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. He spent the summer in the lab of HHMI investigator Arthur Horwich at Yale University School of Medicine.
Horwich studies how proteins fold inside cells. When mutated proteins fold incorrectly, they trigger a broad range of diseases. In Horwich’s lab, Red Eagle focused on a protein called transthyretin (TTR), which, when misfolded, can lead to congestive heart failure or neurodegenerative disorders. He analyzed the structure and toxicity of mutant TTR at different stages of protein misfolding.
During his EXROP summer, Red Eagle learned to tackle big ideas by breaking projects down to one question at a time. “My HHMI experience was a real confidence booster,” he says.
Red Eagle worked in a “dedicated and intelligent” manner, Horwich recalls. That dedication drives Red Eagle’s ultimate goal. He would like to join the faculty of an academic medical center to pursue new therapies for disease. “I want to use science to give back to my community,” he says.
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