Graduate Center for Nutritional Sciences

Contributing to Cutting-Edge Research

The Graduate Center for Nutritional Sciences provides an array of exciting basic and applied research opportunities in state-of-the-art facilities. Because of the Center’s interdisciplinary setup, students have the opportunity to work alongside internationally known researchers with diverse backgrounds in nutrition-related fields. In the process, they learn to apply the newest techniques to explore mechanisms underlying today’s most prevalent human diseases.

One of the Center’s primary areas of research and training targets nutrition and chronic diseases, with a focus on obesity and associated disorders of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Other areas of specialty include nutrition and oxidative stress, nutrition and aging, clinical nutrition, animal nutrition and food science.

The Center houses more than 36,000 square feet of new laboratory space with the newest equipment for cell culture, human and animal studies. The University of Kentucky also has in place multiple core facilities, among them a microarray facility as well as cores for electron microscopy, confocal microscopy, flow cytometry and magnetic resonance imaging.

High-achieving students are selected for prestigious federally funded training grants that provide research funding, travel and other costs. The Center holds an NIH T32 Institutional Training grant for support of predoctoral fellows in the area of nutrition and oxidative stress, in its tenth year of continuous funding.  Recently the Center was funded to promote interdisciplinary research in the area of obesity and cardiovascular diseases at the University of Kentucky through an NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence Grant and an additional NIH Biomedical Research Core Center focused on fetal programming as a mechanism promoting obesity and associated diseases.  NIH Program Project Grants, individual NIH R01 grants, and private agency funding support research by faculty and students of the Center.  In addition, graduate students within the Center have successfully competed for individual fellowship funding from the American Heart Association and other private agencies.