“We know that obesity in adults is linked with more than 200 different diseases. Research tells us that in obesity the immune system becomes overactivated, which damages tissues in the body, and some immune cells become depleted so they can’t protect properly. I want to see how we can protect children living with obesity from these immune system changes, to protect them against future disease and damage.

How did you get into this area of research?

I am the first person in my family to go to university. I went to Maynooth University through the access programme, then after my PhD I worked as a Newman scholar with Donal O’Shea and Lydia Lynch in University College Dublin.

We were interested in a type of cell in the immune system called the invariant natural killer T-cell. It attacks viruses and tumours, but stops working properly in obesity. When I moved back to Maynooth to set up my own research group, I thought it would be interesting to look at immune changes in younger people living with obesity.

What did you find when you looked at children with obesity?

We did a project with the National Children’s Research Centre, where we worked with children living with obesity at age six, 10 and 16. We could see kids as young as six were starting to show signs of chronic inflammation, a type of immune-system overactivation.

They already had molecular markers of it in their bloodstream. I thought maybe if we can intervene with children who are living with obesity and stop this immune activation, turn down the chronic inflammation, we could perhaps delay or reduce related disease in adulthood.

We are looking at options there, using a gut hormone that is known to tone down chronic inflammation. There is a shorter-term outlook too: in another project we are looking at obesity and vaccinations.

Tell us more about that.

We know that some vaccines are less effective in adults with obesity, which makes sense. After all, we have been showing for 15 years that in obesity the immune system is overactivated or exhausted.

So we looked at the responses to childhood measles and rubella vaccinations, and in a small study we found that children with obesity have far less of the antibody titre after vaccinations, which means they may not be as well protected from these diseases. Now we are looking at this more closely in larger numbers of children, and we hope to examine responses to the HPV vaccine too.

What do you love about your work?

I just really enjoy it. Of course there are times when things don’t work out as you expect, but I’m a sunny-side-up kind of person, and you just rethink the experiment or find a new direction.

What do you do to take a break?

I find that exercise is a great way to clear the mind. When I was a teenager I did a lot of kickboxing, I was number one in the world at one point. In the last few years I have been doing CrossFit, and I was involved in opening a gym where I teach classes. It’s one of those things that, no matter how you feel at the start of the class, you will always be happy about having done it afterwards. It’s a great way to unwind.

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CHENNAI: Standing in front of the class, dozens of impressionable faces look at her attentively. Regina Magdeline remembers her first day as a teacher clearly. It was in 2014 and she was talking to class 8-D in SBOA Schools and Junior College in Anna Nagar.“I cannot describe the feeling. It was amazing,” says the 27-year-old. After completing her Bachelors in Education at Dr MGR Educational and Research Institute, Maduravoyal, her first job as an English teacher was in her alma mater.

Her love for teaching English comes from the number of stories and interpretations that can be taken from one text, and listening and telling these stories to her students makes the demanding career so worth it.
She was inspired to take up teaching by her English teacher, who became the principal of SBOA when Regina began teaching. Life came a full circle for Regina. “She was my favourite teacher.

What she looked at and how she spoke were two completely different things, and that was why I liked her so much. When I worked under her, she used to support me and help me a lot. She would make me teach the classes with slower students, just to train me properly,” said Regina. After one and a half years of teaching at SBOA, Regina left the school for her sex reassignment surgery. She returned to teaching, after her recovery, at a CBSE school in Peelamedu, Coimbatore. But this is where her troubles began.

Starting fresh
“They had asked me to teach class four. However, as I had worked with senior students earlier, I had no experience with children. But they said that as I was a junior, I had to teach them. After a year of working with children, I was promoted to teach classes nine, 10 and 11. However, one teacher who joined two months after me was given classes 10, 11 and 12 before me,” she said. This was discouraging to her, but she decided to take it in her stride and continue teaching.

She did not explain her gender to younger students, as she felt they were too young to understand. “But they loved me. They used to ask for me and come running behind me, and even if I missed one day, they asked for me endlessly,” she said, smiling. She cleared the air with her older students quickly, and she saw them accept her as their teacher very easily. “I saw the way they treated the transgender people who walked on the street. When they had spare change, they used to give it to them, and treated them very well. It was very heartwarming,” she said.

Politics at play
Regina started noticing favouritism among the teachers and some issues within the system. When she raised them, she came under fire from the higher management. “I think they did not like me much because of my gender. But I was also someone who had a mind and spoke straightforwardly, and not everyone wants those kinds of people working under them,” said Regina. She soon quit her job.

Now, left without a job, Regina has written to the Minister of Education, Tamil Nadu, with the assistance of Sahodaran, citing her plights and requesting for a job. She has been unemployed for a year and has to take care of her ailing mother without earning bread. “I want my students to know that life is a race. They do not have to run the fastest to win. They can take their own time, because everyone has their own journey,” she said.

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