Learn by Heart

Learn by Heart

Meet Jennifer Pollock: cardiovascular researcher, collaborator, optimist and 94th president of APS.

By Melanie Padgett Powers

In April 2021, Jennifer Pollock, PhD, FAPS, became the 94th president of the American Physiological Society (APS). She holds an endowed professorship in nephrology in the Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She is also the co-director of the Department of Cardio-Renal Physiology and Medicine and co-director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences TL1 Predoctoral Training Program at UAB. She is also the director of the Kidney Pipeline Programs, which include the PRIME T32 training program, UAB KURE R25 summer undergraduate research training program and UAB PROmoTE R25 team science research training program.

The Physiologist Magazine interviewed Pollock about her career, the collaborations that she loves and what she is focused on as APS president.

How did you become interested in science?

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t interested in science. When I was little I wanted to have an ant farm. I had a garden and experimented with where to put the seeds. I was always fascinated with anything about science. Nobody in my family had a medical or science career. My mother was a secretary at an elementary school, and my father was a salesman at Sears. I was the aberration.

How did you get interested in physiology?

I was a biology major, chemistry minor. Then, my husband, David, and I met in undergrad and decided to get married after graduation. I was always going to get my PhD in biological chemistry, and he was getting a PhD in physiology. We had absolutely no money, so we had to live on our stipends, and it became very clear that we could not live on two graduate school stipends—stipends were about $3,000 a year at that time. So, I decided to quit the PhD program and took a position as a research assistant, which surprisingly helped me to focus on what I wanted for a career.

Science is more fun with collaborations when you bring different perspectives to the same question. My personality is such that I don't want to do science by myself. That is absolutely no fun at all.

Jennifer Pollock, PhD, FAPS

In the meantime, the university had a non-thesis master’s degree program in chemistry at night for those working full time. So, I worked full time as a research assistant and completed the requirements for a master’s in chemistry at night. Then, David accepted a postdoc position at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, so I decided to apply to the PhD program in the chemistry department at UNC. I was very focused on chemistry and biological chemistry, not physiology at the time. All my PhD work was strictly biological chemistry, but when I started my postdoc, doing research with a focus on physiology was more exciting, and I gravitated toward physiology moving forward in my career. So, I was coming from a very basic science background and moving into biomedical science, if you will, for physiology, and I really connected with this more.

Tell me about your current research.

I have several collaborative projects. Science is more fun with collaborations when you bring different perspectives to the same question. My personality is such that I don’t want to do science by myself. That is absolutely no fun at all.

One of the projects I’ve been working on, going on 20 years now, is this concept of how things that happened to you early in your life can change your susceptibility to different diseases later in life. We look at how early-life stress can influence your risk for cardiovascular disease. We use an animal model to decipher mechanisms, but we also have translational collaborations to determine the consequences of early-life stressors in adolescents and young adults on the risk for cardiovascular disease and hypertension. We found that individuals exposed to childhood adversities have elevated blood pressures much earlier in their life course.

We are now deciphering mechanisms for how the long-term detrimental effects of early-life stress may occur. One thing we found was that it has something to do with abnormal function of their blood vessels. We found that young adults and adolescents exposed to childhood adversity have blood pressure changes and aortic stiffness compared to individuals with no exposure to adversity. Those are major risk factors for cardiovascular disease later in life. If you’re already having those risk factors when you’re an adolescent, we want to know what we can do to try to prevent it. So now, that’s a big question we hope to answer. If you’re a person that has exposure to early-life stress, could we influence you then to change your lifestyle?

Another project stems from my postdoc work, which was related to nitric oxide and whether it’s a vasodilator. My postdoc adviser, Ferid Murad, MD, PhD, won the Nobel Prize for this, so I’ve always maintained that as a major research interest of mine. This project combines my interest in nitric oxide signaling, blood pressure regulation and the kidney. We have found that a high salt diet activates nitric oxide production in kidney tubules to mediate sodium excretion, but a high salt diet also disrupts nitric oxide production in the endothelium of blood vessels. We are now studying the different pathways for nitric oxide production in the kidney tubules versus the endothelium. It’s very exciting.

The other big project is focused on circadian rhythms and time of day feeding. While my laboratory is focused on the blood vessels, we also have collaborations with labs focused on the kidney, liver and brain. We fed mice a long-term high-fat diet for five months, but in the last two weeks of that treatment, we allowed them to have food only during their active period. When we took out their blood vessels, the ones that had been eating high-fat for five months had fatter aortas and other vascular problems along with a lot of fibrosis in the kidneys. Then when we compared those animals to the ones that had two weeks of the time-restricted feeding, it was striking. The mice with two weeks of time-restricted feeding had normal aortas and kidneys with very little fibrosis. It’s really something. The timing of when these mice eat is a big deal. 

What about your work fascinates you?

The excitement of learning or discovering new knowledge, but also being a part of all these collaborations. The other part of what fascinates me is working with students and fellows—how a student will come up and you chat about the research and then the lightbulb goes off. That is the coolest thing to happen, to be a part of that. Or they bring an idea and it flourishes. Or they get so excited about the research. I just love being a part of that—where they are all excited for their careers and being scientists themselves. 

Tell us how you got involved with APS and what it has meant to you.

After I got involved in physiology, a colleague in another department, maybe 30 years ago, asked me to get involved in their APS section. It was someone coming and talking to me about getting involved in the Society. That’s the lesson I learned-—that people just want to be asked. Once I got involved in APS, it was an amazing adventure because I learned so much about leadership opportunities. I was able to fine-tune those skills. I learned how to motivate folks and get people involved in career development. I’m also involved in other scientific societies, but no other society has been so welcoming.

As APS president, how do you want to advance and expand the community?

The major thing for my year as president is to make sure that we have a well-structured, organized physiology meeting; that’s going to be premiered in 2023. And, of course, there’s the pandemic and “post-pandemic” transition for our Society. I want to make sure the membership is involved, that members feel like the Society is working for them.

What do you do for fun?

Pre-pandemic, David and I traveled quite a bit and have many great friendships from our travels to conferences. The fun part was that we would always take an extra day or two of personal time to absorb the local culture. So, I miss this fun part since the pandemic.

Now, I have a new granddaughter and a grandson on the way, so that has changed my priorities a little bit. Luckily, our kids like us to come and visit, and we’ve enjoyed being able to have that during the pandemic. I was vigilant to make sure I did not somehow get exposed to the coronavirus because I didn’t want to miss visiting my granddaughter.

What’s on your bucket list?

Definitely on my bucket list for science is that I want to know the answer to some of the research questions I’ve been working on for so long. It drives my husband crazy. He tells me that there’s no way I will retire because I keep asking more questions!