University of California Irvine, School of Biological Sciences, Department of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
Project Title: Lipid Antigen Presentation as a Driver of T2D Inflammation
Award Year: 2022
Biography
Dr. Dequina Nicholas is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry where her lab studies the intersection of the nutrient environment, the immune system, and metabolic disease using a combination of molecular and cellular biology, transgenic mouse models, cytokine profiling, and flow cytometry. Dr. Nicholas’s work focuses on how the immune system and cellular metabolism impacts endocrine diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome. Dr. Nicholas received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Loma Linda University and pursued postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Barbara Nikolajczyk at Boston University, studying the metabolism of immune cells from patients with type 2 diabetes. She also trained in the laboratories of Drs. Mark Lawson and Pamela Mellon at the University of California San Diego, where she established the importance of glucose metabolism in reproduction and discovered a population of immune cells in the pituitary that regulate the reproductive axis. Dr. Nicholas’s NIH Director's New Innovator Award from the NIAID funds her “immunoendocrine” lab where her mission is to train the next generation of diverse scientists.