Season 3: 2017-2018

Glad to announce the kickoff of our Gastronauts series 2017/18. We are on our 3rd year! and this would have not been possible without your attendance and support to the monthly meetings.

September 2017: Stem cells

Chris Delaney, Ph.D., at North Carolina State University. The primary focus of Chris’s research is unlocking how intestinal stem cells proliferate after injury.

October 2017: Biliary stem cells

Adam Graz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. His collective work has explored how cells pattern to form functional tissues.

November 2017: The gut, the brain, and addiction

Ivan de Araujo, D.Phil, Associate Professor in the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale University. The goal of his lab is to define the sensorimotor circuitry that controls feeding programs.

December 2017: Mood and bugs and guts

Alban Gaultier, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. To study the effect of the microbiome on depression and anxiety, Dr. Gaultier’s lab used the unpredictable chronic mild stress (UCMS) protocol to induce a depressive phenotype in mice.

January 2018: Handy glia

Anthony Blikslager, DVM, Ph.D., DACVS, Professor of Equine Surgery and Gastroenterology at NC State University. His lab’s focus is gastrointestinal physiology, specifically studying repair of the intestinal barrier and its role in healing in diseases like strangulating obstruction in animals and necrotizing enterocolitis in human newborns.

February 2018: Microbiome-immune crosstalk

John Lukens, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. His research aims to understand how immunologic pathways and interactions contribute to neurodevelopmental diseases.

March 2018: Hormone regulation of social reward

Jenna McHenry, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Her work focuses on the neural circuitry that links social and emotional processing within the brain.

April 2018: Metabolomics and xenometabolomics

Sean Adams, Ph.D., Director of the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center where his research aims to understand the molecular processes that underlie metabolic disease and obesity.

June 2018: Pediatric enteric neurons

Robert Heuckeroth, M.D. Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics and practicing pediatric gastroenterologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia- Research Institute. His research aims to better understand enteric nervous system anatomy and development to translate into clinical pathology.