I grew up in Southern California1 and discovered my calling to medicine through global health coursework as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. Inspired to address global hunger and malnutrition in accordance with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, my early research focused on malnutrition in Guatemala, Kenya, and with the World Health Organization.2 Furthering my studies, I pursued a master’s degree in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford. When I began medical school at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), my advisor suggested that I shadow in the adolescent eating disorders clinic given my research interests in nutrition. I soon found that I loved working with teens and selected the eating disorders clinic for my continuity clinic. Over the course of the year, I cared for a teenage boy who struggled with an eating disorder. Barriers in his care made me aware of the significant gaps in research and the lack of guidance for boys and men with eating disorders. This motivated my research on eating disorders in boys and men during my pediatrics residency at Stanford and adolescent medicine fellowship at UCSF. I am fortunate to stay at UCSF as faculty, which allows me to continue my research and clinical work in adolescent eating disorders.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, our program experienced more than a doubling in hospitalizations for eating disorders. Screen time concurrently doubled given social distancing and the cancellation of events. Many of our patients expressed how increased social media use exacerbated their eating disorder symptoms. Because of this relationship, I became motivated to further investigate problematic social media and mobile phone use, which is the focus of the current study.3
Based on my experiences, there are two lessons I would like to pass on to future physician scientists. First, align your clinical work with your research when possible. Let your patients inspire you—your direct experiences caring for them will allow you to identify gaps and challenges in the field, serving as guidance for further research. Second, my mentors encouraged me to dream big and prioritize important research questions that could revolutionize fields or improve clinical management. This has led to my overall research objective to inform gaps in clinical and public health guidelines for adolescent and young adult health, including eating disorders in boys and men, as well as guidance for adolescent digital technology use.
References
Nagata, J. M. The battle hymn of the tiger child. JAMA Pediatr. 169, 1087 (2015).
Nagata, J. M. WWJD? Am. J. Trop. Med Hyg. 100, 11–12 (2019).
Jason M. et al. Baker Social epidemiology of early adolescent problematic screen use in the United States. Pediatr Res. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-022-02176-8.
Funding
J.M.N. was supported by the National Institutes of Health (K08HL159350), the American Heart Association Career Development Award (CDA34760281), and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (2022056).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Nagata, J.M. ECI biocommentary: Jason M. Nagata. Pediatr Res 92, 1205–1206 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-022-02305-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-022-02305-3