Graduate Assistant
East Tennessee State University
I am a new researcher working on my PhD. I expect to graduate in December of 2023. Previously, I worked 21 years for Target Corporation in various supervisory roles. My time with Target has enabled me to be proficient at supervising and training many employees at the same time, as well as additionally honing collaborative, intuitive, and autonomous skill sets. I have been a lab manager for two labs as a graduate student: one for my previous lab with Dr. Jonathan Peterson (now a SRO at the NIH) and now my current lab with Dr. W. Andrew Clark. I am responsible for coordinating and supervising several graduate students and many undergraduate students with their research projects. My current research focuses on breastmilk microbiome and short chain fatty acid profiles of women who are normal or overweight/obese body mass index. My dissertation research focus is on neonatal fecal gastrointestinal microbiome of premature (<32 wk gestation) infants born to mothers of normal or overweight/obese body mass index. I have collected over 100 samples determining both fecal fermentation profile and neonatal microbiome using 16s ribosomal DNA analysis. After graduation, I anticipate working as a post-Doc assessing fecal fermentation and microbiome profiles on a collaboration with Medical University of South Carolina determining how maternal nutrition impacts the longitudinal growth (up to 2 years of age) of premature neonates. I have skills doing this already through my current lab. My research interest is to determine what in infant development and programming is the root cause in the progression of obesity. I have previously worked on metabolic syndrome studies including men with HIV who are on PrEP and have malabsorption, female mice with alcoholic liver disease, and mice with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease due to Western diet. I am currently working with several collaborators including children born with neonatal abstinence syndrome and children 2-5 years who have failure to thrive. Other collaborators I work with study major depressive disorders and comorbidities of use of alcohol in rats.