The energy, insight and creativity of Dr. Annabelle Rodriguez, the founder and chief scientific officer of Lipid Genomics Inc., is astounding, according to company CEO Gerry Smith.
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The energy, insight and creativity of Dr. Annabelle Rodriguez, the founder and chief scientific officer of Lipid Genomics Inc., is astounding, according to company CEO Gerry Smith.
Rodriguez allows her work to be led by observations that others may overlook by adherence to convention, Smith said in an email, adding that she has perceptions connected to the real world that lead into the unknown — where there is little, if any, standard science.
“A good term for this process is cognitive dissonance, where an aspect of reality is being seen but does not fit into mainstream views,” Smith wrote. “Annabelle has an extraordinary ability to find and unbiasedly explore those observations, without getting stuck on a set way of seeing things.”
Smith valued that ability to see the overlooked when he was managing director of equities for Pennsylvania's Public School Employees' Retirement System, “and it's what I immediately recognized in Annabelle's work and her ways of looking at things,” he said.
No wonder, more than a decade ago, she questioned conventional wisdom that people with desirable levels of good cholesterol, HDL, shouldn't have heart attacks. Seeing patients with high HDL and heart disease at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, she questioned why, studying the genetics behind it.
“That's our mission, to help understand that paradox,” said Rodriguez, 59, a physician-scientist who joined UConn Health in 2012 to advance the technology of her fledgling Lipid Genomics company, which moved into the school's Technology Incubation Program in mid-2015.
She is an ardent supporter of the Bioscience Connecticut initiative and the good it's doing for companies and the state, a message she hopes resonates with citizens. She's also a strong supporter of exposing high school and college interns in her lab to the wonders of science and real-world application of lessons learned in class to solving medical ailments.
Rodriguez was born in Honolulu and grew up in southern New Jersey. Her father was a career Army man and her mother had studied nursing in her native Puerto Rico, but never finished after marrying, becoming a housewife and raising her family. Her father, who served two tours in Vietnam, went to college after his military career to study Spanish and education, using it to teach in high school, and was a college freshman at the same time as his daughter.
“It was funny, sometimes I'd complain, 'My coursework is harder than yours,' ” Rodriguez said with a laugh.
Her interest in the sciences emerged after she realized she had an aptitude for math and science.
“I find it interesting,” said Rodriguez, who got her bachelor's degree at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and went to New Jersey Medical School, which is part of Rutgers, graduating in 1983.
She then spent three years training in internal medicine with Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia, followed by a two-year biochemistry fellowship at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, then three years as an endocrinology fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, joining the faculty and working there until her move to UConn in 2012, where she is a professor and the Linda and David Roth chair of cardiovascular research, the first to hold that endowment.
In addition to the rewarding work at UConn Health and working to grow Lipid Genomics, a labor of love she does tangentially to her UConn research, she enjoys the state's quality of life and her short, two-mile commute to work.
She and her husband of 34 years, Ray Oquendo, who works for IBM's global services team, have two grown children, a daughter, Mariel, 31, and son, Eric, 28. Mariel is married to Smith's son, Ryan. Ryan Smith is business development manager for Lipid Genomics and Eric is business manager. It was through Ryan's budding relationship with Mariel that Rodriguez met Gerry.
The big picture Rodriguez sees for Connecticut is one where its bioscience industry can play a central role in helping not only find new medicines but inspire youth, generate new companies and jobs, and help the state.
“It is about innovating, finding new solutions for the common good and as a physician scientist I think Connecticut is just beautifully poised to help solve that,” she said, praising the state's investment in the industry and knowing that in trying fiscal times, not everyone will support the effort.
