Research Summary
Ian Williamson is an ASBMB MOSAIC fellow working in Dr. Rodger Liddle’s lab at the Duke School of Medicine on enteric neurosignaling. He was recently awarded an NIDDK K99/R00 to establish an independent lab to study neural and microbial regulation of enteric metabolism. He previously trained in the Duke Gastroenterology T32 program, mentored by Dr. John Rawls and Xiling Shen where he published work showing that dietary fat alters enteric fructose metabolism, increasing the production of glycerate that damages pancreatic islets and contributes to glucose intolerance. He earned his doctoral degree from the UNC/NCSU Department of Biomedical Engineering in the lab of Dr. Scott Magness developing high-throughput organoid platforms to study niche signaling and host-microbe interactions. His lab will leverage organoid and whole-animals models to study enteric metabolism in fasted and fed states to identify key regulators of enteric nutrient conversion and metabolism to develop therapies for metabolic disease.
Relevance of Research to CGIBD Mission: Dr. Williamson’s research focuses on enteric metabolism in the context of obesity and metabolic disease, which are areas of focus for CGIBD. He is a biomedical engineer funded by the NIDDK who trained on the Duke GI T32.
CGIBD Focus Area(s): Translational research, microbiome, metabolism
Collaborators: Bohorquez, Gonzalez, Rawls
