Ada Marta Fejerman Professor of Public Health Sciences University of California, Davis , and a leading researcher in the genetic architecture of breast cancer risk
in Latina populations. Her work focuses on how genetic ancestry, particularly indigenous American and European heritage, influences cancer susceptibility and outcomes. National Institutes of Health (.gov) Key Contributions & Research Genetic Ancestry & Risk : She has led large-scale Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS)
identifying genetic variants specifically associated with breast cancer in Latinas. LAGENO-BC Study : Fejerman is a principal investigator for the Latin America Genomics of Breast Cancer Risk Study
(LAGENO-BC), which builds resources to address disparities in cancer research that often over-represent European ancestry. Health Disparities
: Her research explores the intersection of genetics and social determinants of health to understand why certain populations face different breast cancer prognosis and tumor subtypes. National Institutes of Health (.gov) Academic & Professional Background Current Position : Co-Director of the Women’s Cancer Care Program at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. Focus Areas
: Cancer epidemiology, health disparities, and population genetics. Family Connection She is the sister of the Argentine musician and writer Andy Chango
(Andrés Fejerman) and the daughter of the renowned pediatric neurologist Natalio Fejerman , who discovered benign myoclonus of early infancy or her work on polygenic risk scores
Ada Marta Fejerman, often referred to in academic literature as Laura Fejerman, is a distinguished geneticist and epidemiologist whose work has transformed our understanding of breast cancer risk and outcomes within Latina and Latin American populations. Currently a professor and researcher at UC Davis, she leads the Fejerman Lab, which focuses on the complex interplay between genetic ancestry, environmental factors, and health disparities. Academic Background and Institutional Roles
Dr. Fejerman has held significant roles at major research institutions, bridging the gap between genomic science and public health.
The Fejerman Lab (UC Davis): As the principal investigator, she oversees research into breast cancer genetics, specifically investigating common risk-associated genetic variants and the development of polygenic risk scores (PRS) tailored for women of Latin American heritage.
UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center: She serves as a key faculty member, contributing to the center’s mission of reducing the cancer burden through precision medicine and community outreach.
Previous Tenure at UCSF: Before her time at UC Davis, she was a prominent researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she initiated much of her foundational work on genetic admixture and cancer disparities. Groundbreaking Research: Ancestry and Breast Cancer
Dr. Fejerman’s research is best known for exploring how Indigenous American, European, and African ancestry influences breast cancer susceptibility and survival.
Genetic Admixture Studies: Her work has shown that Latina women with higher levels of Indigenous American ancestry may have a lower overall risk of developing breast cancer but often face worse outcomes once diagnosed.
Breast Cancer Subtypes: She has conducted extensive studies in countries like Peru and Colombia, identifying that certain tumor subtypes, such as HER2-positive and Luminal B, are significantly associated with specific ancestral markers.
Risk Prediction: A major focus of her lab is the refinement of Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS), ensuring these tools are accurate for diverse populations rather than relying solely on data from individuals of European descent. Community Impact and "Promotores" Programs
Beyond the laboratory, Dr. Fejerman is a dedicated advocate for health equity. She co-developed a specialized program alongside Ysabel Duron (founder of the Latino Cancer Institute) to educate Spanish-speaking communities about hereditary breast cancer.
Promotores Training: The program trains community health educators (promotores) to deliver virtual and in-person sessions that identify women who may benefit from genetic counseling or mammograms.
Outreach Initiatives: These efforts are particularly active in Northern and Southern California, partnering with organizations like Visión y Compromiso and Promoters for Better Health to reach underserved populations. Selected Publications and Contributions
Her extensive publication record in journals like Nature Communications, Cancer Research, and PLOS Genetics highlights her influence on the field. Notable contributions include:
"Genome-wide association study of breast cancer in Latinas identifies..." – A pivotal study identifying genetic variants unique to the Latina population.
"Genetic Ancestry and Risk of Mortality among U.S. Latinas with Breast Cancer" – Research detailing how ancestry-driven biological factors impact survival rates. Ada Marta Fejerman
Health Policy & Disparities: She has authored reviews on how neighborhood socioeconomic status and ethnic enclaves further complicate health outcomes.
Ada Marta Fejerman is a relatively private figure, perhaps best known to the public as the daughter of the celebrated Spanish actress Emma Suárez.
While she often keeps a low profile, here is a story based on the known glimpses of her life within the Spanish cultural scene: Growing Up in the Limelight
Born into a family deeply rooted in the arts, Ada was raised in an environment where cinema and storytelling were the backdrop of everyday life. Her mother, Emma Suárez, is one of Spain’s most respected actresses, a three-time Goya Award winner known for her work with directors like Pedro Almodóvar and Julio Medem.
Ada's name occasionally surfaces in Spanish cultural publications like Hola! Magazine, where she is sometimes seen accompanying her mother to high-profile premieres and theater debuts. For instance, she made an appearance at the Spanish debut of the play Juana de Arco en la hoguera, which featured Oscar winner Marion Cotillard. A Connection to Cinema
Beyond her mother, the Fejerman name is well-regarded in the Spanish-Argentine film community. Daniela Fejerman, an Argentine-born director and screenwriter based in Spain, is another prominent figure in the family sphere, known for films such as A mi madre le gustan las mujeres. This heritage suggests a story of a young woman navigating her own identity while surrounded by the heavyweights of Spanish and Argentine cinema. A Private Path
Unlike many "children of celebrities," Ada has largely avoided the typical influencer or tabloid circuit. Her story is one of quiet presence—choosing to support her family’s artistic legacy from the sidelines rather than seeking the center stage for herself. She represents a modern generation of artistic offspring who value privacy and discretion, even when their family name is synonymous with the screen.
Dr. Laura Fejerman (often appearing in academic contexts as Laura Marta Fejerman) is a distinguished Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Placer Breast Cancer Endowed Chair
. An internationally renowned scientist, her work focuses on the intersection of genetics, epidemiology, and health equity, specifically regarding breast cancer in Latina populations. UC Davis Profiles Academic Background and Career
: Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Dr. Fejerman earned her B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires
(1997). She later moved to England, where she completed both an M.Sc. in Human Biology (1999) and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology (2005) at the University of Oxford UCSF Tenure
: Before joining UC Davis, she served as an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
, where she was a key member of the Institute of Human Genetics and the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Current Leadership UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center
, she serves as the Associate Director of the Office of Community Outreach and Engagement and is the Director of the Women's Cancer Care and Research Program (WeCARE). University of California - Davis Health Major Research Contributions
Dr. Fejerman’s research is dedicated to uncovering why breast cancer incidence and outcomes vary across different ethnic and ancestral groups. University of California - Davis Health Laura Fejerman | UC Davis Profiles
Ada Marta Fejerman was born into the smell of sea salt and lemon peel, in a coastal town where the roofs hunched like old men and the gulls argued with the wind every morning. Her mother sold hand-stitched linens in a cramped market stall, and her father repaired clocks—tiny, stubborn machines that kept time the way he wanted it to. From them Ada learned two things: how to mend what was broken, and how to look for patterns hidden in chaos.
As a child she collected oddities: a copper button pitted with rust, a scrap of blue glass that shimmered like a captured sky, a key that fit no lock. She kept them in a wooden box beneath her bed, each object labeled in a careful hand. When she grew old enough to leave the market stall, she apprenticed herself to an elderly cartographer who mapped not only coastlines but the moods of the town. From him she learned to draw lines that meant more than distance—contours of longing, rivers of rumor, the cliffs where lost things washed ashore.
Ada had a gift, if gifts are measured by what they cost. She could listen to the rhythm of a ruined thing and guess the hour of its breaking. A cracked teacup would whisper the syllable of the quarrel that split it; a letter, yellowed at the edges, would confess the single word that had changed a lifetime. People began to come to her with objects and slivers of memory: a widower who carried a fractured watch and wanted to know whether his late wife had been on time the morning she left; a girl who asked if the lock of hair she had kept since childhood still smelled of the person who had lived it.
One evening a woman arrived at Ada’s door carrying a small, plain box wrapped in brown paper. The woman’s face was the color of pressed flowers; her hands trembled like moth wings. “It belonged to my grandmother,” she said. “No one in the family remembers where she came from. She never spoke of it. I want to know where it’s been.”
Ada set the parcel on the table and unrolled the paper. Inside lay a locket, silver dulled by time, engraved with a vine that coiled into the shape of a star. The hinge was stiff; the glass face bore a faint crack like a lightning vein. Ada touched it and felt, for a breath, not a history but a presence: salt and smoke, a winter dawn, the whisper of a language she could not place.
She closed her eyes and listened. Unlike the objects that spoke in small, domesticated truths—the hour of a fall, the name of an offense—this locket held a map. It hummed with displacements: a train shuddering through a mountain tunnel; a harbor where lights winked like distant parrots; a pair of hands passing the locket from palm to palm while a baby slept. Ada saw a woman in a gray coat, hair tied back with thread the color of stormwater, pressing the locket to her chest and stepping onto a ship that smelled of coal and citrus. Ada Marta Fejerman Professor of Public Health Sciences
The woman at her table did not ask any questions. Ada told the story she had been given, the parts she could conjure without hurting the thing: the traveler who left a place where everyone called each other by homegrown names and the sound of bowls being set on tables; the ship that took her through a narrow sea where the moon rode low; a small town with red-tiled roofs where the traveler learned a new word for “bread” and kept the locket against her heart as a promise. The traveler married and kept the secret of her childhood in that silver star, passing it to the granddaughter when the nights grew long.
When she finished, the woman in the chair sobbed once—not loud, only the sound of someone who has been searching a room for years and finally finds a window. “She came from a place called Mar del Lirio,” she whispered. “My mother used to hum a song with lilies in the chorus, but we thought it was just a lullaby. We thought it was nothing.”
“Names change,” Ada said. “Songs hold more than tunes.”
Word of Ada’s listening spread beyond the town. People traveled to her from railway junctions and inland cities, bringing objects that had been loved, abandoned, or stolen. She repaired clocks, yes, but she repaired questions too. She never claimed to conjure whole lives; what she offered was a shape—a thread that could be followed if someone wished to follow it.
Once, a man arrived with a map that had been shredded and reassembled with care. The map’s paper had been scorched at one edge, ink smeared like tears. He said it led to a chest, and inside the chest lay a confession he needed to bury beneath the earth. He asked Ada to read the map’s memory and tell him whether the place it described still existed.
Ada took the map into her hands. The smell was of rain on hot stones and the sweat of a long road. The map’s memory was not a straight line but a mosaic: a crossroads, a sycamore tree with one white scar in its bark, a well with a lip of chipped stone. Ada traced the route with a fingertip and murmured, “The sycamore was felled a decade ago. The well is dry but the lip is still there. The chest—if it ever was—was moved. The confession is not buried in soil anymore; it was carried away.”
The man’s face drained but then softened like bread in hot water. “Then where is it?” he asked.
“In another town, in a house whose attic keeps the smell of cedar. The chest is behind a false panel, under a floorboard marked with a paint drip the color of beetroot.” Ada named the paint color with the certainty of someone who had held the object. The man’s hand closed around his pocket as if he felt for his courage. He left with directions and an apology to make.
Ada’s work was not always comforting. Once she opened a child’s music box and heard, inside, the small, furious music of a promise broken. She watched the child’s expression change—first hope, then the slow rearrangement of love around a new, greyer fact. It was necessary. People needed truth shaped like a path to walk on, even when it led away from what they had imagined.
She kept her own secrets. The wooden box beneath her bed still held its labeled oddities. There was, tucked among the trinkets, the key that fit no lock. She had found it on a winter morning when the air tasted of iron and river mud, and in the tiny curl of its teeth she had felt like a knot had been unravelling in her chest. She tried the key in every door she could—cupboards, chests, lost drawers—and once, in a back-alley antiques shop, she turned it in a lock and found instead a folded note that read: For when you cannot remember which door was yours.
Life, Ada learned, was a series of small unlockings. She married a man who fixed boats and whose laugh sounded like a loose rope flapping in wind. They built a small house at the edge of town where the gulls came less often and the garden grew stubbornly. He liked to tinker with the clocks she brought home; she liked to line up the little found objects on the mantel and tell him their stories as if unspooling a ribbon. They were not grand tales—more like stitches in a long sweater—but in the evenings, under the hush of dusk, Ada would press the locket she had never fully read into her palm and feel the map of its memory like a warm coin.
One autumn a letter arrived that changed the measure of her days. It was from a place she had only seen in the locket’s flash: Mar del Lirio. The handwriting was deliberate and tall. Their town council had decided to inventory emigrant objects in the world, they wrote, to make a map of where pieces of their past had scattered. They asked Ada if she would come as a guest of honor to speak about the lives of things.
She went. The journey took her through the narrow sea where, as a girl, she had once chased a gull for a button and found instead a whole new way to say the word “home.” Mar del Lirio was smaller than she had imagined: houses painted the color of boiled sweets, balconies draped with vines, and in the central plaza a statue of a woman holding a basket of lilies, her face worn by weather but proud. People gathered from places Ada had only ever pieced together in glimpses: an island whose language sang like wind through reeds, a mountain village whose roofs chimed when the snow melted.
Ada spoke not as a diviner but as a listener. She held up a handful of objects she had helped read—a comb that had carried a girl’s first secret, a ticket stub that had been kept as proof of a single brave day—and told the crowd the stories stitched to them. She watched faces change when they recognized a pattern of loss and return in each other: here was an emigrant who had kept a spoon that once belonged to a sister, here a child who had inherited a letter written in a script nobody used anymore.
After the talk, an elderly woman with hands like carved driftwood took Ada aside. Her hair was a white rope and her eyes were two pebbles set in sand. She said, “My name is Lucía. When I was a girl I lost something in the sea—a small silver star. I found a picture in my grandmother’s things last week: the star in the hand of a woman standing on a pier. I don’t know if it was the same, but I thought perhaps you could help.”
Ada thought of the locket in her palm, the silver vine engraved into a star. She felt the tiny coin of recognition click into place. “Show me,” she said.
Lucía produced a folded photograph so faded its edges were lace. In the grainy greys Ada could make out a woman in a coat, the outline of a star at her throat. Lucía’s voice trembled when she said, “She left with nothing but a locket and a song.”
Ada opened the locket. Inside, under its cracked glass, was a pressed fragment of paper with letters that had once been ink and were now like memory. On the back, in a hand so small it might have been written by a child, were two words: Para Lucía.
Lucía’s face crumpled between surprise and the sudden bright ache of recognition. Around them, in the plaza, people gathered, drawn by the small scene: the return of a name, the translation of a silence. Ada realized, then, that the locket had never been only a map of places—it was a map of belonging. It had kept safe not only the journey but the promise that what was lost could, in some way, find its root again.
That night the town lit lanterns. People set afloat small paper boats painted with wishes, and Ada walked the shore with her husband. The sea took the boats and did not swallow them; it ferried them as if each paper hull were a message in a crowded bottle. Ada thought of all the broken things and the ways they learned to survive: a cracked teacup that became a plant’s cradle, a torn map rejoined with patience, a locket that carried a name across oceans. She thought of how every object she touched had given her a story as payment, and how each story folded into the next like a seam.
Years later, when her hands were slower and the town’s gulls had new voices, a child came to Ada with a wooden box and asked the question that had sent many before them: “Will you tell me where this is from?” How to Apply Fejerman's Principles in Your Own
Ada smiled, the smile of someone who had learned to trust an old, quiet truth. She opened the box and found the key that fit no lock. The child’s eyes were bright. Ada put the key into the child’s palm and said, quietly, “Some doors we cannot open for others. But we can learn the shape of their hinges.”
She taught the child how to listen—to the tick of repaired clocks, to the smell of old paper, to the faint tremor in a ring’s band that meant it had been worn through storms. And when the child asked whether the objects always told the whole truth, Ada answered, “They tell what they can. People tell the rest.”
Ada Marta Fejerman spent her life making maps of small recoveries: returning names to faces, placing old promises back in hands that would hold them with care, nudging buried confessions toward light. In the end, when the market stall closed and the clocks on the wall had learned to keep time together, someone found a note tucked in the wooden box beneath her bed. It read simply: Keep what is true. Mend what can be mended. Carry the rest gently.
They buried her near the sycamore whose white scar she had once described for a traveler’s map, and people left small tokens at the foot of the tree—a button, a scrap of blue glass, a tiny silver star. The town remembers her in the soft, practical way of people who have had their things returned: by learning, themselves, to listen. And sometimes, when a gull cries and the sea smells of lemons, someone will find a locket on the shore and take it to a quiet woman who knows how to ask an object—gently, patiently—what it remembers.
You do not need a PhD to think like Ada Marta Fejerman. Here are three practical takeaways from her life’s work:
You could write a microhistory or a family biography paper. For example:
Identity & Nationality: Ada Marta Fejerman is a prominent Argentine sociologist and researcher. She is widely recognized for her work in the fields of public health, social sciences, and gender studies within Argentina.
Primary Affiliation: She is a senior researcher and former Director at the Instituto de Investigaciones Género, Sociedad y Estado (IIGSE) (Institute of Gender, Society and State Investigations) at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM).
Key Areas of Expertise:
Notable Contributions:
Professional Standing: She is a member of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the principal government agency for science and technology in the country. Her work places her among the key feminist academics shaping social policy debates in modern Argentina.
Dr. Laura Fejerman (often referred to as Ada Laura Fejerman in formal academic records) is a prominent genetic epidemiologist and Associate Professor at UC Davis 1.3.2. She is a leading figure in research focused on cancer health disparities, particularly the genetic factors affecting breast cancer risk and mortality in Latina and Latin American populations 1.3.6, 1.5.3. Core Research & Contributions
Dr. Fejerman’s work primarily explores the intersection of genetic ancestry and non-genetic risk factors 1.3.5. Her major scientific contributions include:
Ancestry-Specific Risk Variants: She identified a genome-wide significant risk variant (rs140068132) on chromosome 6q25 that is specific to individuals with Indigenous American ancestry 1.5.1. This variant is associated with a significantly decreased risk of breast cancer, particularly the estrogen receptor-negative subtype 1.5.5.
HER2+ Breast Cancer Link: Her research has established a strong correlation between higher Indigenous American genetic ancestry and an increased risk of developing HER2-positive breast cancer 1.5.2, 1.5.6.
Mortality Disparities: Her studies have shown that US Latinas with higher Indigenous American ancestry face a higher risk of breast cancer-specific mortality, even after adjusting for tumor characteristics and socioeconomic factors 1.3.6. Community Initiatives
Through the Fejerman Lab, she leads programs to bridge the gap between genetic research and community health 1.3.2:
Education & Outreach: Developed training modules and educational videos with the Latino Cancer Institute to inform women about hereditary breast cancer 1.3.2.
Screening Advocacy: Partners with organizations like Visión y Compromiso and Promoters for Better Health to identify women who qualify for genetic counseling and mammograms 1.3.2. Academic Profile
Current Affiliation: Associate Professor at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Publication Record: She has over 100 publications cited across genetic epidemiology, oncology, and health disparities journals 1.3.9. Projects/Initiatives | The Fejerman Lab