Brooke Bullard, a third-year Ph.D. student in Angela Murphy's lab at the School of Medicine Columbia, received a prestigious three-year F31 award from the National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).

Bullard's F31 work will focus on understanding the benefits of dietary panaxynol, a bioactive anti-inflammatory compound in American ginseng, on gut resilience in colitis. Specifically, she will examine the impact of panaxynol on immune, microbial, and metabolite profiles in mouse models of colitis, with the goal of developing panaxynol as a safe and effective agent to treat colitis in the clinic.

This F31 will allow Bullard to advance her training in natural compounds and colitis (mentor: Dr. Angela Murphy), gut microbes (mentor: Dr. Jason Kubinak), and microbial metabolites (mentor: Dr. Jie Li).  She holds excellent credentials, including authorship on 12 peer-reviewed papers, one of those being a first-author original research manuscript on the benefits of panaxynol in colitis (PMID: 38469632), and three being first-author reviews. Additionally, the SOMC student received the SPARC Graduate Research Grant from the USC Vice President of Research in 2023, has participated in ~40 conference presentations across the country, and has served on three committees at the School of Medicine.