Analia Loria leads a lab team that is studying the effect of early-life stress on metabolic syndrome—a group of risk factors like obesity, elevated cholesterol and insulin resistance that together raise a person’s risk for heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

Loria, who grew up in Argentina, is an assistant professor in pharmacology and nutritional sciences in the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. She says she planned to work in a hospital, but science took her to other destinations—like postdoctoral training in the United States and currently a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant on which she is principal investigator.

Loria is looking at gender differences related to early life stress, and she says there are many differences between men and women that could have significant impact on the future of personalized medicine. Most of the current therapies to control blood pressure were tested only in males. They don’t work the same way in females. “We need more research, because the current therapies some of them have started to account for this sex effect, some of them are still not,” Loria says. 

Loria and Margaret Murphy, a postdoc in Loria’s lab, are featured on LabTV.com. This website features videos with medical researchers who tell where they came from, how they chose their career, what they do each day in the lab, and why they love it. LabTV’s founder, Jay Walker of TEDMED, said he started the site because if high school students can personally identify with a young medical researcher, they are far more likely to consider becoming one. LabTV’s network features more than 1,000 researchers working at dozens of leading universities, corporations, and the National Institutes of Health.