#22 Brittanie Winfield: The Biology of Trauma

**Note: The video version kicks in around 16:13. Before that, only Brittanie's video is working.**Brittanie Winfield is a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she works in Dr. Sarah Linnstaedt’s lab in collaboration with the UNC Institute for Trauma Recovery. Her research uses longitudinal whole-blood RNA sequencing and multi-omic data from the AURORA Study to ask one of the most consequential open questions in trauma science: why do some survivors recover while others develop chronic post-traumatic symptoms? Before graduate school, she earned a BS in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota and spent two years in genomics R&D at 3M developing liquid-biopsy assays.Nearly everyone will live through a potentially traumatic event. Most people recover. A substantial number don’t, and go on to develop chronic pain, PTSD, depression/anxiety, and other persistent symptoms. Brittanie studies the difference between those two groups not just psychologically but biologically, as a molecular, measurable reality: how the immune system and hormone signaling respond in the early aftermath of trauma, and what separates the people whose bodies resolve that response from the people whose bodies never mount it at all.It’s a question she also comes at personally. She talks about her own years in therapy, and more recently in somatic experiencing, and what that work has taught her about the difference between understanding something analytically versus processing it in the body. We get into her current study with the AURORA cohort, what the data is showing, and what it might mean for how trauma gets treated.A NOTE OF THANKSBrittanie is the first guest to ever travel to Austin for this show. Shetook time away from a PhD, got on a plane, and sat across from me for hours — generous with her science, and more generous with herself. An episode like this only happens when someone decides the conversation is worth the trip. She did, and I’m grateful for it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitchellpenningroth.substack.com