简介

The major goal of my laboratory is to understand the mechanisms underlying adipose inflammation associated with obesity, and the molecular links between adipose inflammation and obesity complications such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. We combine in vitro molecular and cellular approaches with in vivo metabolic phenotyping of mice with modified genetics under various diet conditions. Our approaches are “mechanism” focused and truly interdisciplinary, involving transcriptional assays, fluorescence microscopy, immunochemistry, and in vivo metabolic measurements of animals. These approaches represent both the training in adipocyte biology and obesity research I received as a graduate student in Dr. Hei Sook Sul lab at UC-Berkeley, as well as nutritional immunology expertise acquired as a post-doctoral fellow at Western Human Nutrition Research Center, ARS, USDA and Department of Nutrition, UC-Davis under the direction of Dr. Daniel Hwang. As a new faculty member at the University of Tennessee, I have excellent opportunities to engage in scientific collaborations with faculty members spanning multiple departments. For this particular proposal, our laboratory has a close collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Jason Collier (Department of Nutrition), Dr. John Biggerstaff (Center for Environmental Biotechnology and Departments of Nutrition, Microbiology and Biochemistry, Molecular and Cellular Biology) and Dr. Naima Moustaid-Moussa (Department of animal science) at University of Tennessee, which allows us to directly interact on approaches related to our common goal of understanding mechanisms underlying obesity and inflammation. Recently, we have set up collaborations with Dr. David Wasserman (Director of the NIH Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (MMPC) at Vanderbilt University) and Dr. Chaodong Wu (Department of Nutrition and Food Science at Texas A&M University) on mouse clamps studies and in vivo insulin signaling studies, respectively. The diverse knowledge and expertise base that each of our laboratories contributes to these studies puts us in a unique position to achieve our objectives by allowing us to address multiple key questions in innovative ways. As the principal investigator, I have the experience of administering projects. My research team, collaborators and I are well prepared to conduct the proposed research successfully.