Before Nathaniel “Nathan” Glassy became a PhD student in the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School, he taught music classes in the public school system of Shreveport, Louisiana, for seven years.
Glassy played timpani and marimba while studying music education at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. His desire to understand the mind led him to pursue research and work in a neuroimaging lab at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport.
“While I was teaching, I got interested in how music affects the brain and started reading a lot. I went to scientific conferences to meet people and attend lectures and took free courses online. I decided that I needed formal education to pursue this passion,” said Glassy, who earned his master’s degree in biology at Harvard Extension School.
Glassy is a student in the Population Health Sciences program at UMass Chan, one of three pathways to a PhD in biomedical sciences from the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Together with mentor Bo Wang, PhD, professor of population & quantitative health sciences, Glassy will be focused this year on HIV prevention studies internationally, reducing stigma and modeling developmental trajectories for youth and young adults. He spent his first year at UMass Chan studying co-occurring opioid use and mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression and PTSD.
“As people receive pharmacotherapies, they get peer support, a peer specialist and cognitive behavioral therapy,” Glassy said about his study. “This helps provide vocational training to get people on their feet and not just give them a pill and say, ‘Have a nice day.’”
Glassy earned a TL1 Training Program grant from the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science after developing a pilot project for a wellness study to understand participants’ abilities to mindfully observe and describe their feelings of drug craving and depression without automatically reacting to these feelings. In the future, this work could help individuals develop healthier coping strategies for emotional regulation and reduce substance use.
Glassy’s long-term goal is to work in the research industry, running clinical trials and implementing intervention programs in behavioral health. In the meantime, he plans to join the Graduate Student Council. He likes to keep up with music skills by writing his own ambient, classical or electronic dance music.
The Student Spotlight series features UMass Chan Medical School students in the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing and T.H. Chan School of Medicine. For more information about UMass Chan Medical School and how to apply, visit the Prospective Students page.
