Alaina Shreves, M.S., joined the Metabolic Epidemiology Branch (MEB) in 2022 as a predoctoral fellow through the NIH Oxford Cambridge Program. Ms. Shreves earned her bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary, where she majored in neuroscience and public health. Through the Amgen Scholars Program at NIH, she studied the epidemiology of genetic disorders at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Her evolving interests in big data and health disparities led her to conduct a senior honors thesis exploring the life course epidemiology of sickle cell disease and the impact of historically racist health policies. After William and Mary, Ms. Shreves became a postbaccalaureate fellow in DCEG. Under the supervision of Dr. Robert Hoover, she studied reproductive cancers and assisted senior principal investigators with study management for the Connect for Cancer Prevention cohort. Ms. Shreves then obtained a Master of Science in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she researched the health behaviors of cancer survivors under the mentorship of Dr. Lorelei Mucci and Dr. Kathryn Penney. Her thesis examined sleep disturbances among prostate cancer survivors.
Ms. Shreves is currently pursuing a D.Phil. through the NIH Oxford Cambridge Program. As an NIH Oxford Scholar, she will work with Dr. Charles Matthews (MEB), Dr. Aiden Doherty (Oxford), and Dr. Ruth Travis (Oxford) to investigate what types of physical activity are associated with lower cancer incidence. She hopes this research will inform population-level physical activity guidelines, decreasing the incidence of cancer and chronic disease risk factors.