Daniel Do (Cooperstone Lab) presents his poster on the bioavailability of tomato steroidal alkaloids in healthy adults.
The Russell Klein Symposium is an annual research conference hosted by the OSU Graduate Society of Nutritional Sciences that honors the legacy of a talented OSU researcher, educator, and mentor who lost his battle with acute leukemia in 2006. Foods for Health is a proud sponsor of this event, with FFH faculty, members of the FFH affiliate community, and their students prominently featured in the 2023 program.
Martha Belury, a member of the FFH faculty leadership team, shared a thoughtful tribute to her colleague Russ Klein. “Science brought Russ to OSU”, shares Dr. Belury, who joined the OSU Department of Human Sciences shortly before Dr. Klein. “Russ was an outstanding scholar, and an emerging leader in interdisciplinary research focused on diet, nutrition, and cancer.”
Trainees of FFH faculty members Jessica Cooperstone, Rachel Kopec, and Jiangjiang ‘Chris’ Zhu were well represented in the student poster sessions, featuring their work in the bioactivity of tomato steroidal alkaloids (Cooperstone Lab), nutrient bioaccessibility (Kopec Lab), and mass spectrometry-based metabolomics (Zhu Lab). In total, their research programs were represented by multiple posters, with graduate students Daniel Do, Nishita Meshram, Ziqi Li, Agnes Joslyn Komey, Siqiong Zhong and undergraduate student Grace Benecke presenting.
In addition to FFH faculty, 12 FFH affiliates and their students participated in the poster sessions, which included research funded through the FFH seed grant program. “Foods for Health has invested over $750,000 in collaborative research at OSU since 2016”, says FFH Senior Researcher Matt Teegarden. “Not only have we seen a tremendous return on investment in terms of extramural funding, but these grants have also sparked significant scholarly outcomes and helped establish new teams that are still working together today. It’s great to see a lot of it in one place at forums like the Russ Klein Symposium.”
FFH faculty member Ali Nazmi delivered the afternoon keynote address with his talk “The role of intraepithelial lymphocytes in chicken resistance to enteric diseases”. Dr. Nazmi is a joint hire between FFH and the CFAES Department of Animal Sciences, with a lab located on the OARDC Campus in Wooster. His research focus is nutritional immunology, studying host-pathogen interactions.
