Janina Jeff is the woman this pandemic era needs.
The first African American to earn a doctorate in human genetics from 杏吧原创, Jeff focuses her research on populations with African ancestry with the goal of discovering inherited risk factors specific to these groups. She is a senior bioinformatics scientist with Illumina, a global biotech leader in innovative sequencing and array technologies that recently played a role in sequencing an early genome of the COVID-19 virus. And she launched an award-winning podcast that translates cutting-edge genetic research into everyday language.
She developed her entertaining, accessible podcast in 2018 at Spotify鈥檚 first bootcamp designed to amplify voices of women of color. One of three winners among more than 18,000 women who applied, Jeff describes as a 鈥渉ip-hop inspired podcast that uses genetics to uncover the lost identities of African-descended Americans through the lens of Black culture.鈥�
鈥淚 wanted to talk about genetics, DNA testing, data privacy and research in a way that Black people could understand and relate to,鈥� she says. 鈥淥ur genetic identities were stripped away with slavery. DNA can be used to go back and fetch those lost identities.鈥�
She and her team were producing the season鈥檚 episodes鈥攅ach one taking about a month to create鈥攚hen the pandemic hit. 鈥淐razy things were going around, such as the rumor that Black people don鈥檛 get coronavirus,鈥� Jeff says. 鈥淲e dropped everything and put together our in three days and nights.鈥�
That episode won the Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition International Impact award. Jeff herself was named winner of the 2020 Advocacy Award by the , the youngest person and first African American so honored.
鈥淲e鈥檝e got more than 36,000 podcast listeners, and I鈥檇 like that to be more like half a million,鈥� she says. 鈥淚鈥檝e also been thinking about writing a book鈥攁 quick read into genetics with my personal story woven in.
鈥淚鈥檓 finding it so rewarding to be doing science journalism,鈥� she says, 鈥減roviding space for Black scientists and talking about topics we鈥檝e never talked about before.鈥�
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