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Dr. Tommy Wood is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and Chief Scientific Officer of Nourish Balance Thrive, an online-based company using advanced biochemical testing to optimize health in athletes and high performers. Based on their accumulated data, the team is now using machine learning to rapidly and reliably predict both common and complex health problems using, easy and cheap, available data.

Tommy has a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, a medical degree from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in physiology and neuroscience from the University of Oslo. He is also a Director of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, President of Physicians for Ancestral Health, and on the scientific advisory board of Hintsa Performance.

Transcript

Dr. Sohaib Imitiaz: Hi, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Body Clock podcast by Owaves today, I’m delighted to be joined by a fellow, Tommy Wood. So and, Tommy is very accomplished. So he’s a medically trained doctor and he has a PhD in physiology and neuroscience. And he’s being post-doc work in Washington. And he’s also been affiliated with University of Cambridge and University of Oxford through his medical studies on studying biochemistry.

He’s currently the chief scientific officer of Nourish Bonds Thrive. Tommy is also the president of the Physicians for Ancestral Health. And I hope I haven’t forgotten there, Tommy, because you have done a lot. But I will let you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about how you’ve been brought in to kind of this emerging field of lifestyle functional medicine.

Dr. Tommy Wood: Sure. So the one thing that we were talking about- one of the ways that we are kind of connected, was through the British Society of last summits. And so I was one of the founding directors of that. And I’m still one of the directors. I’m the member at large or the Americas representative if you want to call it that. So, yeah. All of that’s absolutely correct. I lived and did most of my training in the U.K.

I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, then did my medical degree at Oxford. And I did two years of working as a junior doctor in London. So I did my F1 and F2 years as a guest optometrist. And when that was coming to an end, I was offered a PhD by somebody who I had done some undergraduate work a few years before then. And she’d moved to Oslo in Norway.

So this is something that I think you and I have in common, which is that when somebody gives you a good opportunity and it sounds interesting, you sort of pretty open to just going for it. So that’s what I did. I left the formal medical track in the UK, went to the PhD. And then during my PhD. I met my, now, wife who’s American. And I moved over here to Seattle in the U.S. So the state of Washington rather than the city of Washington. On opposite sides of the country. It’s okay. It’s really common to get those mixed up.

Dr. Sohaib Imitiaz: The U.K. is a lot smaller, right?

Dr. Tommy Wood: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So then, yeah. I worked here as a post-doc for a short period of time and most of my academic research is in neonatal brain injury or starting to be a sort of pediatric traumatic brain...