Since leaving Canada at 17 to pursue a basketball dream, Annabelle Morgan, PhD, publicly known as Dr. Annabelle, now balances life as a mother of 4, scientist, educator, and author. The dynamic life experiences that encompassed her journey has sparked a deep desire to help others. Growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada, Dr. Annabelle was a 4-sport captain graduating with a 4.0 GPA out of high school. She double majored in Biology and Chemistry and played college basketball for Dillard University in New Orleans, winning 2 conference championships, and student-athlete award 2 years in a row. Unfortunately, Dr. Annabelle did not get to play her senior year as Hurricane Katrina had hit at the start of the season.
In the following years, Dr. Annabelle turned down an offer to play basketball overseas and focused on charitable work for NFL organizations while shadowing various physicians looking to further her education and spark her next path.
She started graduate work at Georgetown University in Neuroscience, where her research focused on the partitioning of the thalamus by the Eph-Ephrin Receptors and Ligands. Dr. Annabelle completed her PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she now resides. At Vanderbilt, Annabelle focused on genetic mutations that mimic the offset effects that chemotherapy has on heart disease. She has presented and published on the resulting cardiotoxicity as well as on the developing cardiac mesothelium. Dr. Annabelle has also completed the NIH clinical trial certification.
During her training, Dr. Annabelle experienced life-changing personal trauma that shifted her focus towards alternative medicine and natural health consciousness. Through Dr. Annabelle’s guidance, her father overcame terminal cancer 10 years ago and has recently just retired. But perhaps the most significant experience is her son Macario, now 4, who has had over 38 percent of his brain resected as a result of uncontrollable seizures. Dr. Annabelle developed a natural hemp-derived medicine to replace her son’s medications. Bridging the gap with application between her scientific knowledge and discovery of plant compounds, Dr. Annabelle fearlessly treated her son beginning at 7 months old. Since then, he has beaten all odds and has no developmental deficits. Macario is a healthy, normal preschooler. It was at that time that Dr. Annabelle realized her purpose in helping people.
Dr. Annabelle has now left academia in order to pursue the possibilities of implementing cannabis and/or plant compounds in general into current modern medicine. As a result, she has dedicated herself to educating to colleagues worldwide on the connection between the complexity of disease and the significance of utilizing natural components of plants, such as cannabis, to make medicine a more efficient, safe, and personalized process. She consults on medical cannabis legalization, standards, and protocols for a variety of countries and firms. More specifically, Dr. Annabelle has dived into a diversity of research initiatives in hopes to encourage a more embodied approach to precision medicine, where communication between scientists, doctors, and in between are better implemented. A coin she termed, the upstairs downstairs effect. Her dream is to see a more out of the box medicine protocol which personalizes specific treatments for specific conditions, based on an individuals’ genetic and cellular characteristics. In her opinion, the miraculous recovery of her son is no mistake and should be an example of the need to empower medicine today.