By age 20, Nathan (Nate) Nair had earned his Master of Public Health. By 25, he had earned his MD. He started his residency in neurosurgery by 30.
The bar was set high for Nate at a young age. His father was a materials engineer and his mother a pharmacologist.
While working at IHME as a Post-Graduate Fellow, Nate also is finishing his residency at the University of Washington. He hopes to combine his drive to improve neurosurgery practices with his interest in measurement techniques.
“We’re still in this early phase of getting to know the brain, and the science is evolving rapidly,” Nate said. “A lot of things I learned in medical school, which was not that long ago, have totally changed, and I want to help make changes that will have a long-lasting benefit for patients.”
It was at Columbia University, where Nate earned his MD, that he first realized how critical it was to break down all the different components that go into improving a patient’s life. He took a year off from school to work at a stroke laboratory where they conducted experiments about the way strokes damage the brain.
“We were measuring not just the initial impact of the stroke but everything that happens after,” Nate said. “Basically, after a stroke, people think that the blood stops. But then you have a release of all these chemicals that make it even worse. You need to stop this inflammatory cascade from injuring even more brain tissue.”
At IHME, Nate is studying functional health status, meaning not just well-established disabilities but also lesser understood conditions that impair function. His work will help IHME create what are known as health state severity weights to help generate new country-by-country estimates for the Global Burden of Disease.
He and a team of researchers are studying anemia based on health surveys in Mexico. Current World Health Organization guidelines define anemia at a certain level of hemoglobin in the blood, below which the heart has trouble feeding the brain and the rest of the body with oxygen. Nate is focusing on whether people experience decreased function – including fatigue, anxiety, and depression – at levels that don’t meet the definition of anemia.
“My goal is to learn the skill set that is not being applied in my field, and take it back to neurosurgery,” Nate said. “The field is relatively small, but the impact on inpidual patients is huge. And the cost is quite large, too. That’s why it’s so important for us to see which interventions are the most successful.”
