Hey!

What’s a turkey’s favorite dessert? A peach gobbler.

Welcome back to my newsletter. Hope you had an amazing November.

For those who don't know, I'm Nina Khera. You may have met me during a meeting, or at the latest networking event in Boston. I'm a 16-year-old human longevity researcher who's working on projects from topics spanning cellular senescence (zombie cells) to epidermolysis bullosa (skin disease)!

This month I’ve done work on Biotein, applied to college, worked on school, and made future brain aging plans.

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Biotein

We will likely be permitted to submit for IRB approval next month, so we have further refined our plans and been doing research into good control/comparison variables for bio-age (aka epigenetic and telomere-based age measurement) + coordinating our initial study based on that research! Also, a member of our team (Anupra Chandran) spoke in Dubai and crushed it! We’re additionally coding some algorithms that are important to our test, and raising about $40K (if you have any recommendations of investors/funds to talk to or opportunities to apply for, let us know!).

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Mindsets and Philosophy

Here are some thoughts I’ve been having!

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do the extra thing that seems hard in the moment. Maybe you don’t want to rearrange the lines of text on your assignment after spending 2 hours working on it, but wouldn’t that make it 5% better? And that’s worth it, right? Maybe you don’t want to give that extra push at the end of the race, but that’ll make it 5% better. Sometimes you have to just do it, even if you’ve already invested a lot and are a bit tired. I feel like that’s important to remind yourself about, because it’s easy to get a bit lazy and not stay in that mentality.
I feel like there is a certain class of people who only really participate in and give their all to things that interest them. And I can’t make up my mind on whether this is a good thing. Sure, if you give your all to things that interest you, you’re more authentic to yourself and enjoy life. Also chances are you’ll do better in those things. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do and the approach really isn’t sustainable for all your activities. You can’t be interested in everything. So, you’ll fail at quite a bit. I guess it’s a difference between concentrated interest in a few areas vs being a jack of all trades. Perhaps the former is more applicable - you have more expertise in some specific areas. But, being good at many things has its perks (being able to do stuff in jobs that isn’t your interest, etc).

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Knowledge Bytes

Here are some recommendations from the month!

- Amazing book: The Story of My Father: A Memoir by Sue Miller! It is reflective and provides an interesting perspective on Alzheimer’s. I’m only partway through but I like it so far (thank you for lending me this, Ms. Schlein!).

- Cool site: https://www.beagreatteacher.com/daily-fun-fact/. I have become weirdly obsessed with this site. Every single day they have a new joke, thought, fact.. did you know that hummingbirds visit an average of 1000 flowers a day for nectar?

- Best bonding activity: long runs. Literally. So fun and also the aches and pains experienced after extend the bonding (silver lining to everything) :).

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Shoutouts

Here are some fun shoutouts:

Thank you to Sanjna for all your timely and kind advice.
Thank you to Dr. Moody and Dr. Ewald for your emails and your thoughts on Biotein’s questions.
Thank you to Mika and Gabi for being awesome XC buddies.

Thank you to everyone reading this. Even if I didn't mention you this month. you probably helped me a lot. Thank you!

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Next Month

In December, I’ll be working even more on Biotein, school, brain aging ideation, and college apps!

Reach out to me if you want to talk about human longevity (or just life sciences in general) or anything else honestly!

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-khera-115b5a175/

Personal Website: https://ninakhera.com/

Email: kheranina@gmail.com (or just reply to this email)

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