ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023

Jordan Gabriela Nestor, MD was raised between New York City and Guayaquil, Ecuador, within a loving [working-poor, medically-uninsured] family. They received thier medical care at Bellevue Hospital and spent countless hours in their waiting rooms. There, Dr. Nestor's mother went from one Spanish-speaking individual to the next, helping them complete medical forms and communicate with the staff, showing Dr. Nestor the importance of service and how anybody can be an advocate for others. As a medical student, Dr. Nestor visited a pod of six hemodialysis patients at a Bronx dialysis unit, once a week for three years. These individuals welcomed her into their lives and showed her the heaviness of their disease in their daily life, and its impact on their families and communities. She initially hoped to have a research career rooted in social determinants of health contributing to higher rates of chronic illness among disenfranchised communities. However, in 2010 the APOL1 G1/G2 alleles were discovered - common coding variants among individuals of West/sub-Saharan African ancestry significantly associated with kidney disease risk. This discovery opened Dr. Nestor's eyes to hereditary risks for kidney disease subtypes and led her to seek out Dr. Ali Gharavi as a research mentor. With the steadfast support and mentorship of Dr. Ali Gharavi and Dr. Krzysztof Kiryluk, she aspires to become an independent NIH-funded biomedical informatics researcher. Their focus on the need for ancestral diversity in genomic research aligns with Dr. Nestor's aspirations to serve understudied patient communities. In June 2020, at the peak of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Nestor completed 8 years of post-graduate clinical training to become an expert in kidney genetics. Now, she wants to meaningfully contribute to improving the long-term health outcomes of Black and Latino patients burdened by chronic illness by developing scalable, automated tools embedded in the electronic health record, that help clinicians use genomics at the point-of-care.