My name is Maggie Murphy and I am a post-doctorial scholar in Dr. Analia Loria’s laboratory
here at the University of Kentucky. I actually began my career as a dietitian, but when I
was in the hospital setting, while I enjoyed talking with people and encouraging them to
adopt heart-healthy diets, I really wanted to understand the molecular mechanisms. Why
are people getting sick? Yes, we know we can treat through food, but we could actually
make a more individualized therapy if we better understood the factors driving these diseases.
So right now I’m studying obesity and metabolic syndrome. So kind of emphasizing in childhood
with early life adversity. It’s a very wide range from childhood neglect, to even parent
bereavement, early parental loss, or even divorce. I grew up in a household where my
parents divorced early, and it was very emotionally traumatic for all three of us. I have two
older brothers and I took a lot of comfort in palatable high fat foods. I ended up quite
overweight. My mom took me to see a dietitian when I was in the fifth grade and I just wasn’t
quite ready to lose weight at that point, but it was a couple of years later when my
brother and my father challenged me to go running with them. As a result, we ended up
doing a 10K as a family event every summer, the one that’s run here downtown on the
fourth of July. As I was going through this metamorphosis becoming more knowledgeable
about how the food we eat, the type of physical activity we perform, how that can really affect
our health, I’m able to take some of the life experiences I have and put that into
my research. So when I joined the laboratory last year, Analia had started a pilot project
in mice that are first exposed to the maternal separation or the first hit early in life
to mimic chronic behavioral stress. We challenge these mice with a high fat diet and then we
measure their metabolic outcomes in adulthood, and it’s very interesting because we’ve
been studying both males and females and we find that even though both genders gain a
significant amount of weight, it’s more exaggerated in the females. And interestingly,
which also coincides with what we see epidemiologically or in humans. So if we actually want to target
and provide individualized medicine, which is the direction of the future, we need to
understand what’s going on between males and females. What makes a female more susceptible
to weight gain? What inside the brain and the adipose tissue is driving this response?
So that’s what I’m trying to tease apart is, “Is the adipose tissue the main contributor?
The liver? Or is it the hormones that regulate appetite within the brain?” And we have
some exciting preliminary data indicating that it’s a combination of all of the above.
So I grew up here in Lexington. I don’t really come from a family of scientists, primarily
accountants, except for my grandmother. I’m named after her and she was the first female
medical technologist in Western Kentucky. So when I finished my Ph.D. also here at University
of Kentucky, I was happy to dedicate it to her because she really wanted to become a
physician, but due to the times. So it’s very important and I very much appreciate
that I’m here in a laboratory primarily of women to see the advancements women have
had in science. My boss is very real with me. We have a very great relationship and
I think it does help that she’s female and she largely understands what I’m going through
and we’re able to be there. It’s much more than employee-employer type of relationship,
and I want people to keep that in mind when they enter science, that this team is not
only do we work together in the laboratory, but we also go out and do fun things together
and we try to practice what we preach, eating nutritiously. We all grow vegetables and Diane,
our research analyst, actually has a very large farm in Winchester and she’s brought
fresh-grown kale, tomatoes, squash. Analia has brought in zucchini. I don’t really
have a green thumb, so I all I can really contribute are herbs, but I just really enjoy
that not only are we co-workers, but we’re also friends.