Ayanna Kindell

ENGL 21003-Prof. Grove

Writing for the Sciences

CCNY Biology Professor Dr. Yevgeniy Grigoryev

Doctor Yevgeniy Grigoryevcurrently is a professor at the City College of NEw York located in West Harlem in New York , New York. In his younger years, he liked to disconnect pieces of any object and reassemble them because of his interest in it. He would see how the object works. Items he liked to dissabmled would be anything that would chime,tick or beep. As a professor, he advises his students to consider every single piece of information of a puzzle, because once everything is joined together the puzzle will be solved and the picture will be clear. His passion for science grew when his parents bought him a light microscope when he was 9 years old. He used his microscope often  to study items in his everyday life. Things like the color eyes ants had, or the reaction substances would have with water. At this point in his life, he did not know what he wanted to be when you grew up but he would soon learn that his passion would turn into a career . In college he either wanted to be a medical doctor or a research scientist. He was an undergraduate at the  Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. In his time here he has received several awards such as a CUNY Honors College Scholars Award and won a research fellowship at the Rockefeller University. His interest in science was due to the desire to help sick patients and cure them. What altered his path was his grandmother being afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

He chose to become a research scientist, being as though the medical field could not help his grandmother with her neurodegenerative disease. In the field he chose he knew that he would be able to  study clinical issues such as the immune mechanisms of transplanting in organs, cancer treatment and its developments, and many more things. Once he graduated from Macaulay Honors College with his biochemistry bachelor’s degree, he left New York for Los Angeles California to get his PhD studies at the Scripps Research Institute. While there, he studied mechanisms of gene regulation, molecular biology and system genomics to list a few items. He utilized high technology known as throughput technology to investigate Gene regulation, and to study regulation mechanisms in the human response system in regards to transplantation. While there, in his lab he created new technologies around his research which was based  on immunology and functional genomics. That is the study of how gene expressions regulate biological functions. The message he created were simultaneous microRNA,RNA, and protein isolation with analysis

Professor Yevgeniy  says “the scientific background or the clinical need was necessitated by the current situation with a solid organ transplantation survival”. This is noted because Transplanted organs such as kidneys are needed due to the growing crisis of failing Health in North American society.  Many ill patients are dealing with continuous damage to their kidneys which results in kidney failure. The current answer for failing kidney health is transplantation which is when A donor kidney is surgically implanted into the patient and that kidney will take over the old kidneys functions and hopefully restore the patient’s health. This is where immunology comes in.  Our immune system is made to defend us from any foreign objects it detects. So let’s dive into the human body and immune system. The immune system is designed to protect us from all foreign objects that do not belong in our system. That includes infections, microbes, and bacteria. The specific cells in our immune system that offenders are called lymphocytes, or white blood cells, which have the specialized immune function to help us. As an antigen, which is an infection, microbe, or bacteria enters our body, our system gives an  immune response,which will then be activated and will retain an immunological memory of that one specific antigen and will send out signals to other cells in our immune system. Once these cells become immunized and develop their memory, they will survive and will be able to correctly defend our bodies from this antigen if it were ever to re-enter our body.

The same response happens when a donor gives an organ to a host when a transplant happens. The transplanted organs have a distinctive protein marker on their  surface which does not match the recipient of the organ. Putting a new organ from one person into the host will damage the organ due to the body’s response which will effectively kill the transplant. That is called a rejected organ. To rectify this, immunosuppressive drugs are prescribed to clear/ eradicate  the immune cells in the host in order to prevent memory retention and a formation that will over time destroy the transplant. the host will receive immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives to keep their donated organ. 

Grigoryev’s research Also focused on the way genes are regulated during the process  known as lymphocyte activation. This will directly lead to the retention of memory cells have. One of his great works shows that despite a patient receiving immunosuppressant drugs, there is still some sort of memory. This was a major finding in the science community because as of right now, the rate of long-term transplant survival is extremely low, which could be due to the chronic damage organs face due to the failure of effective immunosuppressive drugs. Others  he made are more focused on the mechanisms that regulate which genes are expressed and those that are regulated once the lymphocytes are activated using a genome-wide setting. This was done by organizing and profiling all of the expressed genes under certain activation terms in the human lymphocytes.

Along with his interest in teaching science in research, he also freelancers as a science writer and works as a self-defense teacher in Krav Maga. He wishes to continue to write for science too many audiences as he has been doing. At one point in his life he worked at Nature Medicine , and interacted with many scientists throughout different fields. Those scientists being in the field of policymakers and technology experts, and many more. When he was working at American Journal Experts, he was editing pre-submission scientific manuscripts from people around the world who did not speak English as their first language which helped him diversify his linguistic skills. 

The future he predicts will consist of scientists being able to sequence DNA at a very affordable cost, with cell therapy and tissue engineering solving problems in the clinical field. These will help scientists in the very wide gene field. The original price for sequencing DNA was 2.7 billion dollars; it has now fallen to $300 according to OneZero.

Currently, Professor Yevgeniey works at The City College of New York.He teaches biology courses in upper level electives biology. He also aids laboratory instructors in biology courses, and manages the revision of laboratory exercises within the biology courses. He hopes that his scientific writing and PhD research will permit  him to introduce science communications to different audiences .