Clearing the air

UND alum Loren Wold talks air pollution, cardiac research, and giving back

Referencing the recent wildfires that although originating in California and/or Saskatchewan have impacted much of North America, Loren Wold reflected on his childhood. “Growing up in North Dakota, I used to always think how we had, well, perfect air,” mused the 2003 UND grad who today serves as Senior Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Surgery at The Ohio State University. “Farmland. Open fields. But that’s actually far from the truth.”

Wildfire smoke notwithstanding, the constant churning of earth and plant matter by farm machinery has the potential to “re-aerosolize” herbicides, pesticides, and other airborne particulates, noted Wold, resulting in a less pristine prairie than those living in North Dakota might think.

And not only farmland, but places like Columbus, Ohio, where Wold lives today, feel the impacts of such industrial activity. “In 2023,” said the researcher, “there were three days when Columbus had the worst air quality of anywhere in the world.”

From North Dakota to Boston and back

This thinking about the effects a person’s environment has on their health is what took Wold from Bismarck to Boston University (BU) to UND – and eventually to Ohio. After earning an undergraduate degree as a biology-psychology double major at BU in 1997, Wold took a year off in Bismarck to decide his next step: medical school, grad school, or work – likely as a science teacher.

“I taught the anatomy and physiology and chemistry labs at the University of Mary,” he said of his gap year. “I also worked as an EKG monitor tech at the hospital and also was a bellman at a local hotel. I was just figuring out what I wanted to do.”

As Wold was weighing his options, one of his U. Mary colleagues – Margaret Nordlie – suggested he consider a career in research. Many longtime UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences supporters will recognize the name: Margaret is the daughter of Robert Nordlie, then Chair of the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (which was later folded into what is today the Department of Biomedical Sciences).

“I said, ‘I’ve never really done research.’ But she said, ‘Well, go shadow my dad,’ who was an international superstar in biochemistry,” Wold continued. And while it turned out that Wold wasn’t especially keen on biochemistry, he was taken with physiology as a field of study, he said. So he applied and was accepted into what was then the UND medical school’s master’s program in anatomy and physiology.

A master’s program soon turned into a doctoral program at UND under cardiovascular physiologist Jun Ren, and by late 2003 Wold was in a postdoctoral program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studying under a variety of world-renowned researchers.

Air pollution you can see

Having focused on diabetic cardiomyopathy for his doctoral research, Wold said that at USC he was turned on to stem cell therapy for heart disease, also known as cellular cardiomyoplasty.

It was here, in L.A., that Wold realized what acute air pollution really looked like. “I remember driving into work one day and I had to turn my windshield wipers on because the ash in the air was so thick,” he mused. “And I said to my boss, who was very famous and on television all the time, ‘I’m curious what effect all this junk in the air has on the heart.’ And he said the effect would be on the lungs, which then might affect the heart.”

Agreeing with his superior in the moment, Wold said, the junior researcher developed a hypothesis and later “proved him wrong in the lab. We published one of the foundational papers in the new field of environmental cardiology, back in 2005.”

That is to say, Wold helped establish the fact that whether wildfire smoke or aerosolized pesticides, factory emissions or automobile exhaust, air pollution affects heart health directly.

Giving back

Today, the nearly 20-year OSU veteran is the senior researcher – the one who fields calls from major news outlets to comment on the health effects of airborne particulates.

And he’s giving back to the institutions that got him there – including UND.

Earlier this year, Wold established the Loren E. Wold, PhD, Biomedical Sciences Endowment with the UND Alumni Association & Foundation. The endowment, Wold said, is designed to produce an annual scholarship for UND students “pursuing a degree” via the SMHS Department of Biomedical Sciences.

“We haven’t defined yet whether it will be just for students in graduate school or also those who are pre-med but are considering careers in the biomedical sciences,” Wold explained. “Part of my goal has been to give back to everyone who helped shape me into the scientist I am today.”

This includes not only UND, BU, or Bismarck High School, but Wold’s friends and family who are not research-trained biomedical scientists. “I’ve become very passionate about describing science to non-scientists,” he continued. “My mother was a nurse and my dad was an electrical lineman for 43 years. Being able to describe to them what I do is so important because, as I say to them, the majority of science is funded by taxpayer dollars.”

Or, as Wold put it more directly, “It should be a requirement, in my mind, to give back the information we learn in the lab to the taxpayers.”