Faculty

Enhancing the nutritional and health value of animal-sourced foods for human consumption; Developing nutritional and management strategies to enhance the level of bioactive nutrients in animal-sourced foods; Examining health effects of functional/nutritionally enhanced animal-sourced foods using cell culture, animal models and clinical trials; Studying how animal-sourced foods foster human health (i.e. prevent chronic diseases and nutrient deficiencies), and their role in food security.

Dr. Chondronikola’s research interests include: the role of brown adipose tissue in cardiometabolic health in humans, pathophysiology of obesity and its related metabolic complications (e.g., insulin resistance, hyperlipidemia), nutritional approaches for prevention/treatment of obesity and metabolic diseases, mechanisms regulating carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in humans, tracer techniques in the study of human metabolism in vivo.

Dr. Heffern investigates the roles that metal micronutrients play in endocrine function and disease. Specifically, her lab seeks to determine how essential trace metals like copper, iron, and zinc, are involved in obesity-related disorders and metabolic dysfunction.

Dr. Fetter's pedagogical research program focuses on assessing differences between online and face-to-face education and determining predictors of success in higher education. She is also involved with nutrition education research.

Dr. McDonald’s research is primarily based in global health nutrition with an emphasis on the design and evaluation of interventions to prevent and treat maternal and child undernutrition in resource-limited settings. Specific topics of interest include: zinc nutrition, child growth and development, and environmental enteric dysfunction.

The increasing public concerns about antimicrobial resistance of food-borne bacteria impose urgent needs to seek alternatives to antibiotics in agricultural animal industry. Many of feed ingredients and additives now are available as potential ‘alternatives to antibiotics’, either by altering microbial populations in the gastrointestinal tract or by influencing the immune system. However, the still-unclear mechanism hampers their application in the industry. Our research interest is to evaluate dietary effects on pig health by investigating impacts of products now available to the industry and developing new approach for the industry. Our long-term goal is to help the animal industry deploy feed-based health technologies to improve animal health.

Dr. Lemay is interested in how dietary components, especially fermentable carbohydrates, affect host response and whether that response is modulated by the functional capabilities of resident microbiota. The lab also applies big data techniques, such as sequencing technologies and machine learning, to understand the effects of diet on human health.

Dr. Kable is interested in the mechanisms governing how diet impacts the bacterial composition of the human gut and how these diet-bacterial interactions can influence human health. In particular, she is interested in how dietary fiber can affect the composition of the gut microbiota in such a way as to increase or decrease colonization resistance and susceptibility to food borne pathogens.

My overarching goal is to evaluate the risks and opportunities of nutritional factors in enhancing neurodevelopment and host resilience to early-life adverse events (e.g. infection and stress). Our research use neonatal pigs as a translational model, becasue of broad resemblance between pigs and humans in many aspects, such as digestive physiology, components of immune system, anatomic structure of brain and perinatal neurodevelopment. Specifically, our current project investigates how unbalanced iron status in early life affects systemic and CNS iron hoemostasis, susceptibility to infections, brain energy metabolism, and social cognition using nursing pigs

Characterizing the microbiota-gut-brain axis in models of inflammatory bowel disease and following infection with an enteric bacterial pathogen. Determining the mechanisms involved in the development of the microbiota-gut-brain axis in early life.