Shearer Lab

Polyunsaturated fatty acids are used to produce regulatory signals which allow the heart and blood vessels to adapt to stress.

Mechanistic insights into cardiovascular protection for omega-3 fatty acids and their bioactive lipid metabolites Abstract. Patients with well-controlled low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, but persistent high triglycerides, remain at increased risk for cardiovascul

Have some!

More people than ever will be cooking at home with their families. On Wednesday, May 20 at 12:30 pm, join Amit Sharma, professor of hospitality management and finance, who sits down with Chef George Ruth, senior instructor of hospitality management, to learn some cooking tips and discuss how this is a great time to get the whole family involved in the kitchen.

For more information:
http://ow.ly/TkmK50zwSSg

Hey everybody, asking for your participation in a COVID19 survey sponsored by colleagues in the CoM.
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Penn State COVID-19 Online Survey regarding COVID-19 Pandemic - PennState College of Medicine - Powered by SurveyHero.com

We are so proud of Dr. Shue Huang, who received her PhD in Nutrition Saturday, Dec 14th. Dr. Huang brought epidemiological talent to our lab. Her dissertation work demonstrated moderate alcohol intake is associated with improved HDL levels (HDL is the “good” cholesterol), however, that improvement is not related to the decreased risk for heart attacks. In other words, moderate alcohol intake reduces risk for heart attacks, but not because it increases HDL. This finding is important to understanding both the benefits of alcohol as well as how therapies aimed at HDL metabolism might (or might not) work. A few notables about her work: she won or placed in soo many ASN competitions, its hard to list them. Shue has already co-authored seven peer reviewed papers, two as first author, and she has multiple first-author works under review. She worked with populations in the USA (the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, aka MESA) and the Kailuan cohort from China (over 100k participants!). She used the causal mediation inference method, and taught me so much about mediation analysis and epidemiology in general. Shue was co-mentored by Dr. Xiang Gao (Thanks Xiang, a formal epidemiologist) and she goes on to postdoctoral work with Andrew Odegaard at UC Irvine SoM. The formal title of her dissertation is “The Role of High Density Lipoprotein for Alcohol Intake and Myocardial Infarction: Results from Two Prospective Cohorts”. Congratulations Shue!

We are so proud of Dr. Kelly Ness, who received her PhD in Integrative and Biomedical Physiology last Saturday. Her dissertation work demonstrated that sleep deprivation impairs the capacity of fat tissue to respond effectively to insulin, both in an artificial intravenous glucose challenge and also in direct response to a high fat meal. She has published three papers thus far in her graduate work and more are forthcoming. During her dissertation work she received many awards, most notably she received an NIH training award for her work. She goes on to postdoctoral work at the Univ. of Washington with Dr. Joshua Thaler working on neural components of obesity and diabetes.
Kelly was co-mentored by Orfeu Buxton, PhD. For those interested, the formal title of her dissertation is: The Effects of Sleep Restriction and Subsequent Sleep Recovery on Glycemic and Lipemic Metabolism

We are so proud of Dr. Rachel Walker, who received her PhD in Nutrition last Saturday. Her dissertation work demonstrated the complex ways in which the fat tissue and the liver work together to regulate distribution of fats during chronic and short term stress. She has published four papers thus far in her graduate work and more are forthcoming. During her dissertation work she received many awards, most notably the Kligman Fellowship for dissertation work. She goes on to postdoctoral work here at Penn State with in Dr. Harvartine’s lab and she plans to continue work in the role of inflammation and resistance to insulin during lactation. Congrats !

For those interested, the formal title of her dissertation is: Using Compartmental Modeling to Describe the Effect of Inflammation on the Regulation of Circulating Fatty Acids and Oxylipins by the Liver and Adipose Tissue.

Kudos to our own Shue Huang and all our Penn State colleagues!

Some good ideas in here. Be ready!

Nine Tips for Researchers to Enjoy Their Holidays, Even Mid-Study - Life in the Lab Whether you are going out of town or staying home for the holidays, researchers plan for the special challenges that happen during this time of year. With delicate equipment, cultured cells, and possibly animals, leaving the laboratory can put these valuable resources at risk. Here are some prepar....

This article shows two important findings:
1) In comparison to healthy people, those with pre-diabetes have lipid signaling patterns that are altered towards a more pro-inflammatory phenotype.
2) Treatment of the pre-diabetic subjects with prescription omega-3 fatty acids corrects part, but not all, of the inflammatory signaling

Redirecting

Shout out to my colleagues, Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton and her lab, who find that daily almond intake can improve the function of "good cholesterol", HDL.

Almonds may help boost cholesterol clean-up crew | Penn State University Eating almonds on a regular basis may help boost levels of HDL cholesterol while simultaneously improving the way it removes cholesterol from the body, according to researchers.

The major structural protein in the 'good cholesterol' (HDL) has impaired function in people with pre-diabetes

Apolipoprotein A-I exchange is impaired in metabolic syndrome patients asymptomatic for diabetes and cardiovascular disease Objective We tested the hypothesis that HDL-apolipoprotein A-I exchange (HAE), a measure of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) function and a key step in reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), is impaired in metabolic syndrome (MetSyn) patients who are asymptomatic for diabetes and cardiovascular disease....