As a part of our “Meet Yale Internal Medicine” series, today’s feature is on Garrett Ash, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (general medicine) and assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science.
Garrett Ash, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (general medicine) and assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science at Yale, has been a runner for most of his life. He ran track and cross country in high school and college and later turned to marathon running. He became interested in exercise physiology and wanted to see how he could tie his interests to the well-being of society. Currently, he is an assistant professor of medicine specializing in digital health, and his journey has been filled with a host of fascinating research projects and devoted mentors.
After majoring in chemistry at Swarthmore College, he started a master’s program at the University of Oxford studying the genetics of exercise physiology. He was working with Ethiopian and Kenyan runners in East Africa and had initially planned to go into coaching. But while working on this project, he was advised to pursue a career in research.
Upon his return to the states, Ash completed his PhD in exercise physiology at the University of Connecticut under the mentorship of Linda Pescatello, PhD, CPD, who studies the causes and effects of low blood pressure after exercise. Ash was drawn to this lab in particular because of its dependence on fieldwork and wearable devices. His work required him to follow people with elevated blood pressure for a 24-hour period after exercise. He became inspired by all the important elements of data that could be acquired not from inside the confines of the lab, but from working with people directly and in their places of daily living.
Ash came to Yale in 2016 where he has been ever since. He has completed three postdoctoral appointments as well as a data science fellowship with Mark Gerstein, PhD, Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and professor of molecular biophysics & biochemistry (computer science and statistics & data science).
During his first postdoc, Ash switched his focus to studying diabetes. “Diabetes is a disease that captured my interest because of all the elements that you need to focus on in terms of behavioral health,” explained Ash.
He also became inspired by how passionate people were in this line of work. His second and third postdocs, under the mentorship of Nancy Redeker, MSN, PhD, Beatrice Renfield Term Professor Emeritus of Nursing, and Lisa Fucito, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry, allowed him to study wearable devices for various sleep pathologies. This experience “broadened my knowledge and skills about using wearables that I could bring back to the diabetes field,” said Ash.
As a new faculty member in 2023, he was awarded the best e-poster in Health-related work by Yale Ventures at the Yale Innovation Summit. Ash says that this was the most meaningful award he has received thus far because he was able to merge three major areas of interests: exercise physiology, wearable devices, and behavioral health.
Ash has now been at Yale for nearly a decade and says that his mentors “got him on a journey to shaping his passion and research focus.” His work now incorporates aspects from every lab that he has worked with: he studies wearable devices for diabetes management and uses his data science background to create platforms for those data to be digested and relayed to the user and their healthcare team.
Yale has been a monumental component of Ash’s career: “There is nowhere else you could find the resources to do this type of work.”
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