It's just one example, Wortzel added, of an “insatiable excitement about nearly everything.”
“You rarely see a soporific Christ,” Wortzel said. “The more tired Ryan is, somehow the more energetic he becomes, and it’s absolutely infectious.”
This year, Christ transitioned to HMS neurology professor Philip L. De Jager’s genetics lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Christ is developing a statistical model to study genetic pathways that affect how quickly Alzheimer’s disease progresses.
These Alzheimer’s-related pathways are suspected to be under recent natural selection—showing up more in today’s human population than in previous generations. Reasons why remain unclear, and Christ hopes his model will help solve the mystery.
His experience with Alzheimer’s reaches far back into his childhood: he has cared for both a great-aunt and a grandfather with the disease.
“I saw loss [from Alzheimer’s] in a very tangible way at a young age,” he said. Here, he has founded a group called the Alzheimer’s Buddies Program that pairs students with residents at a local nursing home who have dementia. His own buddy, Sofia, is a physician from the Ukraine.
“I call her my 85-year-old girlfriend,” he said. “Every week I bring her white flowers, and god forbid I forget them!”
Looking ahead, Christ hopes to improve his model and apply it to studying infectious diseases.
After a summer of public health work in Tanzania, he is especially interested in malaria.
He was struck by how the disease causes vast and long-term debilitation in African youth—just like Alzheimer’s does in the elderly.
“I want to work on diseases that disrupt years that could otherwise be fulfilling, wiping away life without killing you.”
And it is by using statistics—perhaps as an infectious disease specialist, or an academic researcher, or a physician—that he hopes to tackle the challenge.
“This model-building thing that I’m still doing now, that curiosity has always been there,” Christ said.“It all started with a public library card, baby.”
—Staff writer Alyssa A. Botelho can be reached at abotelho@college.harvard.edu.