Living in a violence-plagued neighborhood may cause such great stress that a person’s gene expression may be altered. These are the findings of Dr. Katherine Theall, associate professor of global community health and behavioral sciences at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and Dr. Stacy Drury, assistant professor of psychiatry in the Tulane University School of Medicine, and an interdisciplinary team of Tulane University researchers. In their recently conducted study, the co-investigators found that in a group of children, ages four–15, more than 50 percent had experienced at least one life adversity, including witnessing some form of violence.