Professor and Vice Chair for Basic Research, UC Davis Department of Surgery; Scientific Director for the UC Davis Center for Alimentary and Metabolic Science (CAMS) | UCD-DBDC Program Co-Director, Co-leader of Administrative Core

Dr. Adams is Professor and Vice Chair for Basic Research in the UC Davis Department of Surgery. He also serves as the founding Scientific Director of the Center for Alimentary and Metabolic Science (CAMS), established to promote cutting edge research that is relevant to human health and clinical care. Prior his recruitment to UC Davis in 2020, Dr. Adams served for 6 years as Director of the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center (ACNC), one of six national USDA-ARS funded human nutrition research centers. Over the course of 25 years in pharmaceutical R&D, federal government and academic research settings, he has studied fundamental principles of metabolic physiology and bioenergetics by leveraging gene discovery, metabolomics, xenometabolomics and microbiome technologies, animal models and clinical studies.

Professor and UC Davis Nutrition Department Chair, Nutritionist in AES, Director, Didactic Program in Dietetics, Corrine L. Rustici Endowed Chair in Human Nutrition | Co-leader of UCD-DBDC Intervention Core

Dr. Francene Steinberg is a Professor, Department Chair and Corrine L. Rustici Endowed Chair in Human Nutrition at University of California Davis, Nutrition Department (College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences). She received her PhD from UC Davis, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington - School of Medicine, and has been a faculty member at UC Davis since 1996. She has 25 years of academic experience in research and teaching about health and nutritional sciences. Dr. Steinberg’s research program focuses on foods, food components and food choices that impact health outcomes. Specific areas of expertise are clinical trial design and management, and the physiologic effects of bioactive food components to reduce risk factors for cardiovascular and obesity-related chronic diseases. Her research examines dietary biomarkers and metabolic responses that contribute to metabolic health, nutritional phenotypes and the foundation of precision nutrition.

Research Leader, USDA ARS WHNRC; Associate Adjunct Professor, UC Davis Department of Nutrition | Co-leader of UCD-DBDC Intervention Core

Brian J. Bennett, Ph.D, is the Research Leader of the Obesity and Metabolism Unit at the USDA’s Western Human Nutrition Research Center and an Associate Adjunct Professor of Nutrition at the University of California, Davis. His laboratory study’s nutritional genomics, an emerging field that seeks to determine how inter-individual variation and diet interact to affect health status and disease susceptibility. Brian has extensively researched the genetic susceptibility to cardiovascular disease and obesity, how metabolism responds to genetic perturbations and how diet and genetic architecture interact to affect gene expression. A specific interest of Brian’s is understanding the role of a gut microbiota derived metabolite (TMAO) which appears to change with diet and is predictive of cardiovascular disease in humans. To better understand the biology of TMAO, Brian has used a variety of approaches including studies utilizing mice advanced genetic reference panels and small cohorts of humans.

Research Chemist, USDA ARS WHNRC; Associate Adjunct Professor, UC Davis Department of Nutrition | Co-leader of UCD-DBDC Metabolomics Core

Dr. Newman is a Research Chemist with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis California. He is also an Associate Adjunct Professor with the University of California Davis, Department of Nutrition and Director of the Lipid Mediators Research Laboratory of the UC Davis West Coast Metabolomics Center. He is an expert in analytical chemistry, lipid metabolism and metabolomics with >25 years of experience and >175 peer reviewed manuscripts. He has broad domestic and international collaborations in human nutrition, emphasizing the impact of diet and dietary components on nutritionally sensitive disease risk mediated through bioactive lipids and other endogenous small molecules. More recently, his research has turned to nutritional phenotyping and exploring the variability in responses to dietary interventions, including work with extra virgin olive oil varietals and tree nuts. For more information please see https://www.ars.usda.gov/pacific-west-area/davis-ca/whnrc/omu/people/john-newman/. A complete list of his publications can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1T5nGZJIdjfk7/bibliography/public/

Professor, UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Director, West Coast Metabolomics Center | Co-leader of UCD-DBDC Data Analysis Cores, Co-leader of Metabolomics Core

Prof. Oliver Fiehn has pioneered developments and applications in metabolomics with over 400 publications to date, starting in 1998 as postdoctoral scholar and from 2000 onwards as group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany. Since 2004 he is Professor at the UC Davis Genome Center, overseeing his research laboratory and the satellite core service laboratory in metabolomics research. Since 2012, he is Director of the UC Davis West Coast Metabolomics Center, supervising 40 staff operating 19 mass spectrometers. To focus on large cohort studies and translational metabolomics, he has added the ThermoFisher Center of Excellence in Clinical Metabolomics at the UC Davis clinical campus in Sacramento, CA.

The West Coast Metabolomics Center provides the most extensive and most in-depth analysis of metabolites available today, with a focus on informatics approaches to process and interpret LC-MS/MS data. Beside NIH research projects like Dietary Biomarkers as well as Longevity Consortium and Acute to Chronic Pain, his laboratory builds software and databases such as MassBank.us that that hosts over 690,000 public metabolite mass spectra, in addition to MS-DIAL data processing software and the BinVestigate public frontend to more than 2,800 GC-TOF MS metabolomic studies. He co-founded the Metabolomics Society in 2005 and served on its board until 2015. In 2017 he co-founded the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA) for which he organizes a range of workshops and conferences. In further public outreach, the West Coast Metabolomics Center holds monthly public webinars, has a YouTube channel, a newsletter, hosts the MANA website including its job board, organizes three metabolomics professional courses per year and invites international scholars to research visits.

Professor, UC Davis Department of Molecular Biosciences; K.L. Maddy Equine Analytical Pharmacology Lab, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine | Co-leader of UCD-DBDC Data Analysis Core

Dr. Knych is a Professor of Clinical Veterinary Pharmacology with a dual appointment in the K.L. Maddy Equine Analytical Chemistry Lab (“Maddy Lab”) and the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California Davis. She is also the section head for the Pharmacology Section in the Maddy Lab. She is a board-certified veterinary pharmacologist and has extensive experience with pharmacokinetic modeling in a number of different species and >120 peer reviewed manuscripts. Her current research interests included pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic relationships of anti-inflammatory agents, development of biomarkers of drug administration as a means of assessing effect and drug metabolism.