Cell Biologist, Researcher, Health and Fitness Podcaster

Rhonda Patrick | Biography

Dr. Rhonda Patrick became popular for her justification and support to get vaccinated against COVID-19, in 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast show

• By Ojasbi
• Update : September 16, 2021

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Rhonda Patrick is the co-founder of the 'FoundMyFitness' Science Podcast. The show addresses health, science, nutrition, aging, and fitness issues.

Who is Rhonda Patrick?

Patrick holds a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry. As a biochemist, she has done a substantial study on aging, cancer, and nutrition. Furthermore, she is the co-founder of the FoundMyFitness, a Science Podcast and a compendium of resources on healthspan, longevity, science, nutrition, and fitness. 

Early Life and Education

Rhonda Patrick graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry/biochemistry. At the university, she served as the Vice President of the American Chemical Society and its student affiliate.

Subsequently, she received her Ph.D. in Biomedical science from the University of Tennessee-Health Science Center. She spent six academic years at the university and got her doctorate in 2012.

Career

Patrick worked as a Student Research Technician at Illumina from 2001 until 2003. Thereafter, she fulfilled the responsibility of Research Assistant at Salk Institute from 2004 to 2006. At Salk, she researched insulin transduction in misfolded proteins, which is widely encountered in neurodegenerative disorders.

She then worked at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital from 2006 to 2012 while simultaneously pursuing her doctorate. At St. Jude, she came up with a breakthrough finding that a protein crucial to the survival of cells has two separate mitochondrial locations performing different functions. These linked the protein's antiapoptotic effect to an undiscovered role of mitochondrial breathing and the preservation of the mitochondrial structure. Her findings were published in 'In Nature Cell Biology' in 2012.

Consequently, she was taken in as a trainee by Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute as a postdoctoral fellow from 2012 till 2015. There, she was assigned to Dr. Bruce Ames's laboratory that investigated the accéluation of human age-related and metabolic disorders caused by the inadequacies of micronutrients. She studied the role of Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) levels to avoid many of those disorders. In particular, she examined the impact of vitamin D on brain function, comportment, and other physiological activities. She also scrutinized the impact of metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage, and aging caused by inadequate micronutrients. She parallelly researched whether supplements can repair the damage. In February 2014, she released an article in the FASEB on how vitamin D influences the production of serotonin and how autism is involved.

Podcast

In 2012, Patrick co-founded FoundMyFitness Science Podcast, which she facilitates on Youtube. The Youtube channel that uploads the program has 384 thousand followers as of September 2021 and has over 10 million cross-platform downloads. According to Patrick's Instagram post dated 17 February 2018, the channel received a silver button for passing 100,000 subscribers. 

FoundMyFitness aims to help people establish lifestyles that help them stay young and healthy by debunking complicated health-related topics using scientific comprehension. The program discusses domains of health, science, nutrition, aging, and fitness. Its first episode aired on 22 July 2014.

She intends to make people aware of health and lifespan proactively through all of her engagements that range from research to public education. She aspires to disseminate the benefits of the body being exposed to hormone stressors such as exercise, fasting, usage of sauna or heat stress, and the importance of consciousness, stress reduction, and sleep.

On Joe Rogan Podcast 

On 25 August 2021, Patrick was invited to a popular podcast show, The Joe Rogan Experience. On the episode, Rogan and Patrick discussed vaccination against Covid-19 and the associated misinformation.  

Patrick justified getting vaccinated even by young, healthy, and active people in the episode. It was a direct opposite of what Rogan stood by in earlier episodes. Rogan was condemned for making negative public remarks on Covid-19 vaccines in his prior episodes, which had given him a reach to a massive audience. However, it was regarded by many as reckless and harmful.

While Rogan quoted the issue of young people suffering from adverse effects of vaccines such as strokes, blood clots, and myocarditis, Patrick conveyed that similar conditions were prevalent even before the pandemic. She refuted Rogan's claims by emphasizing the relatively low degree of risk if people were vaccinated.

Since then, Rogan has affirmed that he is "not a respected source of information" and said, "I'm not a doctor. I am a fucking moron."

Personal Life

Patrick got married in May 2012 to Dan Patrick, who is also a Co-Founder of FoundMyFitness. The couple welcomed their first child, a son, on 10 August 2017.