Ms Jasmine Mack

Jasmine A. Mack is a second-year PhD candidate in the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, where she is training at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the University of Cambridge Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Jasmine’s research concerns multi-omics analysis of pregnancy complications, from DNA to protein. She is also interested in exploring efficient statistical methods for studying multi-ethnic and admixed populations. In the context of the ongoing maternal health crisis in the United States, Jasmine focuses on clinical, genetic, and environmental factors related to hypertensive disorders during pregnancy and other cardiometabolic traits in study cohorts such as the Pregnancy Outcome and Prediction Study (POPs), the Personalized Environment and Genes (PEGS) cohort, and the UK Biobank. This includes performing genome-wide association studies and exposome-wide association studies with the goal of defining candidate genes and biomarkers that can elucidate the development of pregnancy complications. Specifically, one of her projects includes investigating the genetic variation associated with maternal soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFLT1) levels and how it relates to preeclampsia.

As a Black woman early-career researcher, Jasmine advocates for representation of historically excluded people as researchers as well as participants in research studies. These efforts also translates into statistical methods development, where she hopes to demonstrate more powerful genetic discovery in studying rare health outcomes, when including participants across ethnicity and ancestry in genetic studies. Jasmine earned a Masters in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan, a Masters in Public Health in Maternal-Child Health from Boston University, and a Bachelors of Science in Biology, Psychology, and Linguistics from Emory University.