Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor
Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington
I am a nutritional biologist with 14 years’ experience in both human and rodent nutrition interventions, and a research interest in nutrient-gut-metabolism interactions. My overarching goal as a scientist is to investigate the role of food in metabolic health regarding obesity, insulin sensitivity, protein utilization, and cardiovascular disease. The focus of my work has been to analyze gut-mediated signaling molecules’ response to nutritional interventions and to compare the effect of gut microbial profiles on differentiating responses to those interventions. In these studies, I have used both targeted and untargeted metabolomic approaches to understand how the food-gut-physiology axis produces different signaling responses in fecal and plasma short chain fatty acids, bile acids and long chain fatty acids, and to discern how nutritional manipulation alters the fecal lipidome. To these ends, I have leveraged data from GC/MS, GC/MS TOF, and UPLC-MS/MS to identify modifiers of human metabolism using a variety of multivariate analytical platforms. Over the past 2 years I have been involved in writing manuscripts and grant applications as a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Nutrition in the Indiana School of Public Health. I have coordinated study visits and sample collection with metabolic research units and metabolic kitchens. I have also coordinated sample analyses with both internal (e.g. clinical and nutritional analytics labs) and external research units (e.g. NIH West Coast Metabolomics Center; University of Minnesota Genomics Center; LabCorp Inc), managing both sample delivery and data return and storage. More recently I have elucidated differences in the fecal lipidome and in the adaptability of obese mice to change substrate utilization, AKA metabolic flexibility, in animals with excess adiposity.