Team

Arpana “Annie” Gupta, PhD
Director, Neuroimaging Core, G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Associate Professor
Ingestive Behavior and Obesity Program
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Gupta completed a PhD degree in psychology, followed by an APA accredited clinical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical Center. Her programmatic line of research focuses on the interactions between environmental and biological factors in shaping neurobiological phenotypes associated with stress-based diseases such as obesity. Broadly defined, her research aims to integrate two systems (the brain and the gut) in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms associated with obesity and altered ingestive behaviors. The application of a “systems biology” approach to her research allows her to test the interactions between multiple factors, both inside and outside the body (e.g., sex, race, brain, microbiome, inflammation, environment), in order to better understand the complex pathophysiology of obesity. This is relevant to obesity, as it is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, and disproportionately affects ethnic minorities and women. These alarming projections have led to NIH and Healthy People 2020 priority initiatives directed at reducing ethnic and sex disparities. Her goal is to develop a comprehensive model that provides a powerful and sensitive biomarker that will increase biological readouts of obesity and altered ingestive behaviors, thus bringing to the forefront those individuals who are at increased risk as a result of disadvantaged backgrounds.

In order to pursue this line of research she recently received a R01 grant from NIMHD (NIH) on the “Social Isolation and Discrimination as Stressors Influencing Brain-Gut Microbiome Alterations among Filipino and Mexican American.” She has also received several industry funded grants as PI and till date she has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles. These grants have allowed her to focus on the following main themes of research:

1. Investigate how novel pathways related to the brain-gut-microbiome (BGM) system may explain modulation of signals from the gut-microbiome on the brain via systemic immune activation.
2. Explain how risk factors associated with socio-cultural and environmental stressors “get under the skin” and are embedded in biology.
3. Identify subgroup differences (e.g., race and sex) related to obesity.
4. Model longitudinal patterns and changes across the lifespan as they relate to obesity in order to help predict risk factors leading up to the development of obesity while being able to identify prognostic markers.
5. Determine changes associated with various interventions (e.g., brain-targeted such as cognitive behavioral therapy, or gut-based such as specific diets) directed at altered ingestive behaviors and obesity.

Tien S. Dong, MD, PhD
Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
 
Dr. Dong graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in biological sciences. He subsequently received his MD from the University of Chicago. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Chicago, where he stayed on as faculty for an additional year as a liver hospitalist. While at the University of Chicago, he trained in the laboratory of Dr. Eugene Chang where he investigated the role of the gut microbiome on microRNAs and colon cancer. He then joined UCLA as a gastroenterology fellow in 2016 and continued his research training at UCLA through the Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) program. He finished his PhD in molecular, cellular and integrative physiology in 2020. Dr. Dong is board-certified in internal medicine and in gastroenterology.
 
Dr. Dong's research interest involves machine learning and how the intestinal microbiome influences the development of obesity, metabolic syndrome, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. His clinical interests include cirrhosis, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, alcoholic liver disease, autoimmune hepatitis and other chronic liver diseases.

Gilbert Gee, PhD

Lisa Kilpatrick, PhD
Associate Researcher
G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Kilpatrick graduated from UCLA with a BS with honors in cognitive science and a BS in mathematics. Subsequently, she earned a MA in experimental psychology from Radford University and a PhD in biological sciences from University of California Irvine (UCI). At UCI, she trained with Dr. Larry Cahill, investigating sex differences in the role of the amygdala in emotional memory. Dr. Kilpatrick returned to UCLA to train with Drs. Bruce Naliboff and Emeran A. Mayer as a postdoctoral fellow, who continued to foster her interest in sex differences in the neurobiological correlates of emotional processes, including pain, stress, and resilience, in the context of irritable bowel syndrome and other pain conditions.

Her work has focused on the brain-related aspects of the connection between the brain and body that positively or negatively impact health in multiple research areas with a brain-body aspect, including disrupted brain-gut communication in obesity, brain signatures related to self-body perception before and after cross-sex hormone therapy in transgender individuals, facial dysmorphia-brain morphological relationships in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder due to prenatal alcohol exposure, and the impact of mind-body interventions on brain functional organization in late-life depression. Further, she has sought to understand the influence of sex on brain-body dysregulation, as an important step towards tailoring effective and beneficial therapies to the individual.

Jennifer S. Labus, PhD
Director, Bioinformatics Core
Adjunct Professor of Medicine
G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Labus is the director for the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core in the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience at UCLA and director of the Bioinformatics Core in the UCLA Microbiome Center. She has made seminal contributions to mapping neural networks underlying visceral pain and elucidating brain-gut–microbiome axis in humans. Dr. Labus is an applied statistician with expertise in biostatistics, bioinformatics, treatment-outcome research, multimodal brain imaging, microbiome, metabolomics, and multi-omics integrative analysis using systems biology approaches including machine learning and network analysis. Her current research focused is on determining biological markers (e.g., brain, microbiome, metabolomics, cytokines, and microRNA) of disease, including chronic pain, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease. Using state-or-the-art computational, biostatistical, and bioinformatics approaches, she assesses the interaction between various levels of biological data (e.g. microbiota, metabolites, immune markers, multimodal brain imaging data) with clinical data. The overall goal of this systems-based approach is to identify and target the key regulators of multi’omics-biological disease-interaction networks in order to understand the pathophysiological mechanisms and provide new targets for treatment.

Emeran A. Mayer, MD
Director, G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Co-Director, CURE: Digestive Diseases Research Center
Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Physiology and Psychiatry
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
 
Dr. Mayer has a career long interest in clinical and research aspects of brain body interactions, with a longstanding focus on the bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut in health and disease. He is recognized as one of the leading investigators in the world of brain gut microbiome interactions in GI disorders, including functional and inflammatory bowel disorders, ingestive behavior/obesity. He has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1989.
 
He has published 344 peer-reviewed articles in the leading GI and neuroscience journals, including 100 reviews and book chapters and has co-edited three books. His articles have been cited 44, 350 times and his h-factor is 105. He has recently published a book for the general public on brain gut microbiome interactions (The Mind Gut Connection) which has been translated into 14 languages.

Xiaobei Zhang, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
 
Dr. Zhang received her PhD in psychology from the University of Southern California. Her studies were focused on brain mechanisms involved in monetary and food decision-making. Her dissertation examined the impact of nutritive and non-nutritive sweeteners on value-tracking, food decisions and nutrition pathways in the brain.

Vadim Osadchiy, MD
Resident Physician
Department of Urology
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Osadchiy attended UC Berkeley and graduated with highest honors, majoring in microbial biology. Prior to medical school, he worked as an analyst at a biotech startup focused on delivering an at-home model of clinical trials to patients with rare diseases. He earned his MD at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and is currently a resident physician in the Department of Urology at UCLA. Dr. Osadchiy's research interests include the intersection of the human gut microbiome and human health, most notably with respect to obesity, food addiction, men's health, and infertility.

Rachel Sarnoff, MD
Resident Physician, Internal Medicine
Young Investigator, Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Sarnoff is currently training as a resident physician at UCLA's Internal Medicine Residency Program. Her research interests focus on the interplay between the brain, gut microbiome, and chronic diseases. She currently is investigating the brain-gut-microbiome changes in irritable bowel syndrome under Dr. Arpana Gupta. Previously, she worked under Dr. Martin Blaser at NYU exploring the changes in the gut microbiome related to precancerous polyp formation. She plans to pursue a fellowship in gastroenterology, with a specific interest in an integrative approach to digestive diseases that highlights these brain-gut-interactions.

Michelle Guan
MD Candidate, Class of 2023
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Michelle graduated summa cum laude as a regents and alumni scholar from the University of California Los Angeles with a degree in psychobiology and a minor in biomedical research. She is currently pursuing her medical degree at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA as part of the class of 2023. Under Dr. Gupta’s mentorship, Michelle is working on several projects that focus on understanding how factors related to sex, race, and lifestyle (diet, physical activity) contribute to alterations in the brain-gut microbiome axis that confer increased susceptibility to obesity. She hopes that this research will pave the way for multimodal and personalized therapeutic strategies for obesity that allow earlier interventions for individuals with obesity-risk signatures in their BGM axis.

Allison Vaughan, MPH

Allison is a recent graduate of Stony Brook University in New York with a master’s in public health and data analytics. Before she joined the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, Allison was a study coordinator investigating caregivers’ perceptions of asthma and obesity in their children. She also assisted with a beta-trial of a new app to help caregivers track their child’s asthma.