Jessica Gooding Received NIH Award
Dr. Jessica Gooding (center) with her father (left) and her mentor Professor Shawn Campagna (right) at her hooding ceremony.
Dr. Jessica Gooding, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Campagna Group, received Mentored Research Scientist Development Award in Metabolomics (K01) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her project titled “Metabolic Regulators of Insulin Secretion and Insulin Resistance”.
This Award will allow Gooding to expand her skill set in metabolomics and apply them on three NIH-funded projects, one with Dr. Newgard focused on understanding of the mechanism of fuel-stimulated insulin secretion, another with Dr. Muoio that probes mechanisms of obesity-related insulin resistance in skeletal muscle, and finally a collaborative project with Drs. Newgard and Hirschey that seeks to understand the metabolic impact of the mitochondrial sirtuin SIRT3 on pancreatic islet cell biology.
“We wanted to tell a story that incorporated more complex metabolomics related skills as the project progressed and I expanded my skill set. I have been working on a lot of collaborative projects here, as I was at UT. We picked three that could benefit from a variety of techniques and expanded on those for the research section.” said Gooding. The funding will also allow Gooding to purchase lab supplies, travel to conferences and support her collaboration with the proteomics core.
Gooding grew up in Raleigh, NC, and completed her undergraduate work at the College of William and Mary and NC State University. At the same time, she interned for Inspire Pharmaceuticals in their molecular pharmacology division. Gooding joined the Campagna research group at UT in 2007 as a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. degree in chemistry, and graduated in December of 2011.
“My combined interests in analytical method development, biochemistry, and synthetic chemistry led me to join the lab of Dr. Shawn Campagna at the University of Tennessee for my graduate work.” Gooding said. “There I was able to apply my organic chemistry background to the development of a derivatizing reagent for the detection of a small sugar used by the marine bacteria V. harveyi for quorum sensing. I then applied this method in combination with our metabolomics platform to study the function of this small sugar in other bacteria.”
After graduation, Gooding obtained a postdoctoral position at Duke University’s Sarah W.Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center. During which time, she has learned a variety of targeted metabolomics methods, developed a new targeted method for measurement of a wide array of nucleotides, and has started to develop non-targeted LC-MS/MS methodologies for the group.
This NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development Award was established in 2011 to provide salary and research support for postdoctoral and clinical fellows or investigators who meet the definition of a NIH New Investigator to pursue intensive research training in the field of metabolomics under the guidance of an experienced mentor who has an established research record in metabolomics. The Award was highly competitive and was aiming to train individuals who understand the field of metabolomics and can work and communicate with clinicians and other health professionals to perform, analyze and interpret the data obtained from metabolomic studies.