All about Kaylan.
The scientist, the believer, the mother, and the two worlds I refuse to keep apart.
My mother introduced me at a keynote once as someone who lives in two worlds most people keep separate: the laboratory and the sanctuary. I have never heard myself described better.
So, hi. I am Dr. Kaylan Jackson, and I want you to actually know who is behind The Well Place.
The laboratory
I am a bioanalytical chemist by training, with a doctorate from Clemson. My work lived at the smallest scale of the body, the exosomes and extracellular vesicles your cells use to talk to one another. If you have read the exosome post on this blog, you have met my life's work.
I did not plan it. In graduate school I more or less tripped and fell into a large ovarian-cancer diagnostics project, and had to become an expert in these tiny messengers back when researchers could not even agree on what one was. Eight years, a stack of publications, and a lot of time in front of million-dollar microscopes later, people started calling me the exosome queen haha. I will take it.
The sanctuary
BUT the part a CV does not hold. I am a believer. I am a wife, and a mother to two little boys who remind me daily why I study healing. Somewhere in the years of chasing the science, I stopped being able to keep God on one side of the room and the data on the other. Science, to me, became the art of how His hand works. I do not think you should have to choose between the two, because I never could.
Why I could not let it go
I did not love the level of care I watched so many people receive, especially people of color, especially women. Dismissed. Rushed. Handed a pill and a shrug. I lived a version of it in my own body. So I kept chasing the why, past where the standard tests stop looking, and eventually I built the place I wished I had. There is a whole post on this blog about that story, and about why the numbers made me angry enough to act. This one is just so you know the person telling it to you.
How I actually talk
One more thing, so you are not caught off guard when you get here. I am a PhD, but I do not talk like a textbook. I talk like a friend on a long FaceTime call who happens to know a great deal about your cells. I will take you down the holy rabbit hole and hand you the science and the wonder at the same time.
Come as you are. A well is always open.
Want the science, the stories, and the why? Keep reading. Ready to begin in person? The Reading Room is open.