The Microbes and Social Equity working group and the University of Maine Institute of Medicine present the MSE spring speaker series 2022.

February 9, 2022, 12:00 - 13:00 EST
"Diet, Microbial Metabolites, and Cancer Disparities"

Dr. Wolf completed her PhD in Nutritional Sciences with a focus on microbial sulfur metabolism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December 2018. During her graduate training, she simultaneously completed the Didactic Program in Dietetics and became a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist. Since that time, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Cancer Education and Career Development Program NCI T32 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research investigates microbial mechanisms of cancer health disparities related to inequitable food access and quality. To do so, she uses techniques in molecular microbiology and novel enzyme characterization to understand the metabolic capacity of the human gut microbiome. With her expertise in nutrition and dietetics, she then examines whether dietary intake shifts microbial ecology and function toward the formation of deleterious microbial metabolites contributing to cancer risk. Given that dietary behaviors are shaped by the social and structural environment, her future work will explore relationships between the neighborhood food environment and microbial metabolism in order to mitigate the inequitable burden of cancer in certain groups. 

Dr. Wolf was an author on the journal article which introduced the MSE group published in mSystems in 2021, and is the lead author on a new paper in mSystems on “Bile Acids, Gut Microbes, and the Neighborhood Food Environment—a Potential Driver of Colorectal Cancer Health Disparities”. She has been a long-time member of MSE and a transformative presence in the group.