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Health & Science

South Asians account for 60% of the world’s heart disease patients, and that trend continues for the 5.4 million South Asian immigrants in the United States. South Asians — the second–fastest growing minority group in the country — have the highest death rate from heart disease compared with other ethnic groups.

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indian food
Genetic mutations — inherited from our parents and carried from birth — can increase our risk of developing diseases from schizophrenia to cancer. But environmental factors also play a critical role in determining who develops certain maladies and who doesn’t.

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simpson querrey ali shilatifard epigenetics lab
Rosanna Hertz, author of Random Families, interviewed more than 350 children, their parents and gamete donors to explore how they used cultural narratives about genes and genetics to understand their relationship to their immediate families and donor networks.

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random families cover
Northwestern psychologist Vijay Mittal says human behavior is made up of three primary components: emotion, cognition and motor activity. By examining motor behavior as both an early signal and a treatment tool, Mittal hopes to stop psychosis in its tracks.

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Vijay Mittal Psychosis Main
John Stroup, CEO of the global manufacturing company Belden, helped launch a first-of-its-kind program to help job applicants break the cycle of substance abuse and find employment. A mechanical engineering student at Northwestern, Stroup says the University's emphasis on the humanities helped him become a more well-rounded person.

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john stroup
As Garry Cooper ’14 PhD prepared to throw out used equipment at a Feinberg School of Medicine lab in 2015, an idea hit him: Lightly used, expensive research equipment could be reused rather than trashed. “I kept seeing reports about the funding problems in scientific research — how really smart and innovative junior faculty members are leaving academia and going into industry because of the job and funding prospects,” says Cooper, who studied neuroscience.

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gary cooper lab

One Lucky Duck

Spring 2019
Hannah Chung ’12 hopes to make the treatment of childhood cancer a little more bearable. The co-founder of Sproutel, Chung works alongside CEO and co-founder Aaron Horowitz ’12 to design products that make a meaningful health impact on the lives of patients.

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duck on box
Now, perhaps more than ever, it is critical that we continue the LGBTQ movement’s fight for recognition and representation. The health of our community depends on it.

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brian mustanski
“People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates’ time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense,” says William Revelle, professor of psychology and a self-proclaimed skeptic when it comes to personality types. So when his Northwestern colleagues Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering and Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab, proposed a study to outline new personality types, Revelle, who specializes in personality measurement, theory and research, balked.

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personality illo
Your brain, says neuroscientist Ken Paller, is not like a laptop, shutting down when you close the lid. Instead, when you close your lids at night, your brain remains hard at work, consolidating information you’ve learned that day — and the days before.

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sleep learning