Christina Theodoris: Scientific Artist.

Abstract

Christina Theodoris earned her BS in Biology at the California Institute of Technology and is currently pursuing her MD/PhD at the University of California, San Francisco, in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology. She is a student researcher at the Deepak Srivastava laboratory at Gladstone Institutes, focusing on gene regulatory networks and their disruption in cardiac disease to identify targets for network-correcting therapies. As an artist and a scientist, Christina endeavors to strike a balance between her 2 passions, using her experiences in art to move forward through the setbacks and missteps that are an accepted part of the scientific process as, after all, “there are no mistakes in art.” I was born and raised in Atlanta, where my parents immigrated from Greece. My parents initially came to the United States for graduate school—my father in electrical engineering and my mother in physical therapy. Growing up in Georgia, I always loved playing with my sister in the forest and really enjoyed nature and art. My sister and I were always excited for the daily math puzzle my dad would give us to figure out on the drive to school, and I was inspired by my mother’s compassion for her patients. For high school, I went to a public magnet school for art and science. Thanks to the mentorship of my extraordinary teachers, I was fortunate to be selected for the national Marie Walsh Sharpe art program, where I studied with artists Susanna Coffey and Chuck Forsman, and the national Earthwatch Institute program, where I researched signal detection theory with whiptail lizards in the Arizona desert. Experiences like these set me on the trajectory to pursue my passions in art and science. Christina Theodoris When I went to college, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in medicine; I loved pediatrics …