A Full Life, at Home and in the Lab

For most of his life, Sergio Ita’s focus has been on three things: military service, family, and the sciences.

When he was 15, his mother joined the Army, and he lived at military bases across the country before returning to his hometown, Santa Fe, NM, for his senior year of high school. After graduating, Ita, now a second-year PhD candidate in virology, joined the military as well, completing five years of active duty in the Marine Corps as an aviation electronics technician stationed in San Diego and Okinawa, Japan.

In January 2003, Ita was deployed to Iraq, working on high-frequency radios for long-distance communications and other electronic equipment. “I remember I wanted to go,” he says. “It was actually very interesting because back in San Diego, we’d worked out of these little vans which were powered by generators, and we’d hook them up to fix whatever gear we were working on. When we left in January, before the war had started, they just moved all the vans onto the ship — so my environment in the Persian Gulf was very similar to my training environment in Camp Pendleton.”

Upon returning to serve stateside in 2003, Ita began to consider his options. “When I entered the Marine Corps, I had decided to use my GI bill for college, but I was thinking about staying in the military,” he says. “When I got back to the states, I met April, who’s now my wife, and one of the things I had to consider was that I wanted to have a family. You have to give so much credit to those families who are separated by deployment. Being in the military is its own world: you’re surrounded by other Marines 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you get very used to that culture. I had to step back and ask myself, what were my original goals back in high school?”

For Ita, that meant college. “My mother was an RN, but she had never gotten a four-year degree. I’m Mexican-American, and my grandfather immigrated to the US. I’m one of the first in my family who really had the opportunity to pursue my college degree, so I knew I had to do it.”

Once he decided to continue his education, his focus on the sciences was almost a foregone conclusion. “It was a very natural decision,” Ita says. “I did well in the subject, and my mother was always telling me I should go to medical school. When I started out, that was my goal: to get an undergraduate degree in biology and then go on to Medical school.”

He began his studies at Palomar Community College in San Marcos, California. “One day, one of my biology professors came over, said I was doing really well, and asked me what my plans were. He said they had a scholarship for minority students who were interested in medical school and research opportunities in the sciences. That’s really how I was introduced to a career in research. I applied for the scholarship and got it. It helped me to apply to four-year universities and got me on track to join a lab.”

He finished his undergraduate degree at California State University San Marcos and initially struggled with the choice between pursuing an MD or a PhD. But a life milestone intervened to help make the decision: He and his wife found out that they were expecting twins.

“I’d been volunteering at hospitals and knew that it was going to be very tough to have children and go to medical school,” Ita says. “I knew what kind of father I wanted to be, and the huge commitment that medical school demanded. I realized that research was a better option for the person I was and the life that I wanted.”

The chance to come to Harvard “was an amazing opportunity.” Ita says. “I was a poor kid growing up; when I left for the military, nobody that I grew up with had gone to college or was pursuing anything past a bachelor’s degree. Harvard has so many faculty and options, plus the Medical School’s association with the New England Primate Center — those were all very strong reasons to pursue my PhD at Harvard.”

Ita works in Welkin Johnson’s lab at the Primate Center (in Southborough, Massachusetts), where he focuses on the evolutionary history of retroviruses — “how viruses have influenced human evolution in terms of epidemics and genetics,” he says. For example, “We know HIV itself is a virus that jumped from chimpanzees to humans, but how does that play out in terms of pathogenesis and causing disease?

“One of the proteins recently discovered by a lab at HMS is TRIM5alpha,” he continues. “This protein, along with a handful of others, has been found to actually block HIV infection in nonhuman primates. They looked and found the protein in humans — we have it, but it doesn’t restrict or block HIV in humans. HIV has adapted around the restriction in us. In my research, I’m trying to figure out the mechanism of how TRIM5alpha is able to restrict HIV. We’ve looked at other primates that are natural hosts to immunodeficiency viruses, and in some, the virus is replicating, but doesn’t cause any kind of disease.”

Ita and his wife are expecting their third child, a boy, in May. Going forward, he knows he’ll have to continue making difficult life-balance judgment calls. Next up: deciding “whether to pursue a career at a research-intensive university or someplace where I can teach as well,” he says. “Cal State San Marcos was a small university, and I loved the relationships I was able to build. Seeing the professors here at Harvard, who have their own labs – I see myself in that position, too, being able to teach and interact with students as a mentor, as well as having my own lab. I hope I can figure that out during my time here.”
 

Story Credit: Jennifer Doody