Mathematician Tchetgen Tchetgen Pursues Genetic Epidemiology

Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen is a newly appointed assistant professor in the HSPH Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics pursuing an interest in genetic epidemiology. But his path was not always so clear.

He was raised in the capital city of Yaoundé, Cameroon, until age 12, when he went to boarding school in France. His mother is a high school teacher, and his father is an economist.

Officially, his last name is “Tchetgen Tchetgen,” a reflection of a tradition in Western Cameroon, where sons are given two last names: their father’s and another name they use when they get married. Typically, the two names are not identical. “But I guess my dad wanted to make sure I kept his name,” quipped Tchetgen.

His parents valued education highly, said Tchetgen. All five of their children went to universities in the U.S., as well as graduate schools in the U.S.

Tchetgen enrolled originally at Duke University, NC, as an undergraduate before transferring to Yale. Gifted mathematically, he appeared to be a good match for engineering, but he found himself disinterested and uninspired by his studies.

In 1998, he applied for and accepted a one-year travel fellowship from Yale University to go to Ghana. There, he conducted a research project on using mathematics to model and understand what factors are important to the adoption of new hybrid maize seeds in Ghana. The project was Tchetgen’s first experience of applying mathematics to a subject matter with direct impact on people’s lives, he said. He began to realize that he could use his mathematical ability to promote public health.

After the fellowship was completed, Tchetgen returned to Yale in 1999 and earned his bachelor of science in electrical engineering and applied mathematics. That same year, Tchetgen came to HSPH as a statistical programmer as part of an internship in the Department of Epidemiology.

“I never looked back,” he said. “The spirit here is great. The faculty want to talk to you and share their knowledge with you. I knew then that I wanted to live and work in this environment.”

During his internship, Tchetgen read a paper written by HSPH Professor James Robins about a method to account for missing data in studies. Tchetgen found the paper “profound and elegant.” He emailed Robins and asked to meet.

“We got along well from the start,” said Tchetgen. “Working with him has been a wonderful intellectual ride.”

It was with Robins’ encouragement that Tchetgen applied successfully to the doctoral program in biostatistics at HSPH.

Working with another graduate student, Tchetgen aided Robins in developing the underpinnings of a theory that gives researchers a way to infer the cause of a public health problem when there are many variables and no control group or randomization. Tchetgen used the effort as the basis for his doctoral thesis. He earned his PhD in 2006.

Tchetgen chose to remain at HSPH for his postdoctoral work and applied for a Yerby Postdoctoral Fellowship — named after Dr. Alonzo Smythe Yerby, an African-American pioneer in public health. The fellowship was founded to encourage exactly what Tchetgen has done: bridge his academic training to an entry-level faculty position.

Now that he is an assistant professor, Tchetgen said that his goal is to conduct collaborative work. He specifically wants to apply the theoretical model on which he worked with Robins to genetic epidemiology. That means that the mathematician, ever the scholar, is now learning about the field of genetics from scratch.

“I would like to make an impact on finding genetic causes of diseases and on making lives better,” said Tchetgen.

Most of his life, Tchetgen has lived away from home. “The group of people I work with make me feel at home,” he said. “I live and work in a place where every morning I’m excited and know I’ll never stop learning.”

— Ellen Barlow. Photo by Suzanne Camarata.