On Friday, September 2, 2016, Ruth A. Riedl received the "Excellence Award in Pharmacological and Toxicological Sciences Research Award" for her presentation at the annual Carver College of Medicine Medical Student Research Day.  Ruth is a first-year medical student working between the laboratories of Justin Grobe, PhD (Pharmacology) and John Kirby, PhD (Microbiology), and in collaboration with Mohamad Mokadem, MD (Gastroenterology).  She started working with Dr. Grobe in 2015 as a visiting undergraduate student via the SUMR program, and continued her work in the summer of 2016 via the MSRP program.  Her research is focused on determining the contributions of gut bacteria to energy homeostasis.  Ruth's work utilizes unique instrumentation only available in the Grobe laboratory and in three other laboratories worldwide, which allows for the real-time, in vivo determination of anaerobic metabolism.  She has determined that the energy utilization of gut bacteria contributes approximately 10% of total energy expenditure for a normal adult mouse, that this contribution is almost entirely anaerobic, and that various interventions such as switching between high-fat and high-carbohydrate diets can grossly modify this contribution.  Further, Ruth has determined that much of the metabolic benefit of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery is actually derived from increasing the biomass of thermogenic gut bacteria and thereby anaerobic metabolism.  Ruth is on track to publish these results in a series of manuscripts over the next year. 

Congratulations to Ruth!