Mary Elizabeth Baugh, a research scientist with Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Mentored Research Scientist Development Award to study how metabolic health influences the brain systems that shape what and how we eat.
The four-year award will support Baugh's research into how obesity and insulin resistance affect reward learning and decision-making in the human brain.
"This will be instrumental in launching my independent career as a researcher focusing on interactions between metabolism and brain processes that affect eating behaviors. This project will center on the unconscious biological processes that underlie people's relationships with food," said Baugh, who conducts research in Alex DiFeliceantonio's lab. The lab investigates why we eat what we eat and how it affects our bodies and brains.
Baugh earned her undergraduate and master's degrees in nutrition and exercise physiology. She then spent two years a registered dietitian at the Wake Forest Baptist Weight Management Center before returning to Virginia Tech to complete her doctoral degree in physiology and metabolism.
Obesity and its metabolic complications, including Type 2 diabetes, are a major public health challenge in the United States. Previous research has shown that obesity is associated with changes in brain structure and activity, but scientists want to better understand how those changes translate into everyday behaviors such as learning from food rewards and making choices about what to eat.
Pearl H. Chiu, professor at the institute and co-sponsor of Baugh's project, focuses on computational psychiatry. She brings her expertise in modeling complex behaviors, computational modeling of human brain function during decision-making and successful mentorship of early career scientists.
Baugh's research will investigate how excess body fat and insulin sensitivity influence two key aspects of behavior: how people learn from post-ingestive food rewards and how they make decisions about food and other rewards.
I am continually impressed by Mary Elizabeth and her drive to understand the psychological and neural underpinnings of decisions she saw patients grappling with in her time practicing as a registered dietitian. This project combines her experience as a dietitian with what she has been learning in the lab regarding brain function and decision-making."
Alex DiFeliceantonio, assistant professor and interim co-director of the institute's Center for Health Behaviors Research
Baugh's study combines behavioral experiments with neuroimaging and computational modeling to better understand how metabolic signals from the body affect brain circuits engaged in everyday learning and eating behavior.
The goal is to understand how metabolic and neural signals interact to influence eating behavior and energy balance, with the aim of developing more personalized approaches to treating obesity and metabolic disease.
Baugh will use the award to focus on expanding expertise in cognitive and appetitive neuroscience, computational modeling of decision-making, and functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques used to study brain activity during reward-based tasks.
The project runs through November 2029 and will support Baugh's research program at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke.
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