Biography:

Jenny is driven by the question: what if we studied what makes us healthy, not just what makes us sick? She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University, drawn to the field for its blend of creative and analytical thinking. Along the way, a personal practice in yoga and meditation sparked a deeper interest in applying engineering approaches to help people understand and improve their health.

That interest took her to ETH Zürich, where she completed a Master's in Biomedical Engineering, developing smart wearables and computer vision tools for clinical applications. She then joined Dr. Michael Snyder's lab at Stanford School of Medicine, where she has led the Beneficial Exposome project — investigating how positive environmental exposures, particularly plant-derived phytoncides, affect human health through clinical trials combining multi-omics analysis and wearable devices. Alongside this work, she is completing a Master's in Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Stanford, deepening her foundation in clinical trial methodology and population health.

Her work is helping to bring the positive side of the exposome into sharper focus — and with it, the possibility that our environment holds as many answers for health as it does risks.

Abstract:

We find ourselves at an unusual moment in human history. Across millennia, from the agricultural revolution through industrialization and urbanization, our relationship with the natural world has gradually shifted. The environments we now inhabit, shaped by cities, technological infrastructure, and industrial agriculture, look increasingly unlike those in which humans evolved. As human environments shift away from biodiverse natural ecosystems, these evolving exposure patterns coincide with a global rise in non-communicable diseases.

Yet societal progress need not come at the expense of our relationship with the natural world. Inspired by the Japanese practice of forest bathing, we study phytoncides, volatile compounds released by plants as part of their antimicrobial defense, and their effects on human health. Through controlled clinical studies integrating wearable sensing and multi-omics profiling, we aim to uncover the physiological and molecular mechanisms through which these exposures influence human biology.

In this way, technological innovation, once associated with our separation from natural environments, may now enable their reintegration, allowing us to systematically measure, interpret, and harness beneficial environmental exposures for human health.