Team

Arpana Church, PhD
Co-Director, Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center
Director, Neuroimaging Core, G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Ingestive Behavior and Obesity Program
Associate Professor
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Church completed a PhD degree in psychology, followed by an APA accredited clinical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical Center. Her programmatic line of research focuses on the interactions between environmental and biological factors in shaping neurobiological phenotypes associated with stress-based diseases such as obesity. Broadly defined, her research aims to integrate two systems (the brain and the gut) in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms associated with obesity and altered ingestive behaviors. The application of a “systems biology” approach to her research allows her to test the interactions between multiple factors, both inside and outside the body (e.g., sex, race, brain, microbiome, inflammation, environment), in order to better understand the complex pathophysiology of obesity. This is relevant to obesity, as it is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, and disproportionately affects ethnic minorities and women. These alarming projections have led to NIH and Healthy People 2020 priority initiatives directed at reducing ethnic and sex disparities. Her goal is to develop a comprehensive model that provides a powerful and sensitive biomarker that will increase biological readouts of obesity and altered ingestive behaviors, thus bringing to the forefront those individuals who are at increased risk as a result of disadvantaged backgrounds.

In order to pursue this line of research she recently received a R01 grant from NIMHD (NIH) on the “Social Isolation and Discrimination as Stressors Influencing Brain-Gut Microbiome Alterations among Filipino and Mexican American.” She has also received several industry funded grants as PI and till date she has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles. These grants have allowed her to focus on the following main themes of research:

1. Investigate how novel pathways related to the brain-gut-microbiome (BGM) system may explain modulation of signals from the gut-microbiome on the brain via systemic immune activation.
2. Explain how risk factors associated with socio-cultural and environmental stressors “get under the skin” and are embedded in biology.
3. Identify subgroup differences (e.g., race and sex) related to obesity.
4. Model longitudinal patterns and changes across the lifespan as they relate to obesity in order to help predict risk factors leading up to the development of obesity while being able to identify prognostic markers.
5. Determine changes associated with various interventions (e.g., brain-targeted such as cognitive behavioral therapy, or gut-based such as specific diets) directed at altered ingestive behaviors and obesity.

Tien S. Dong, MD, PhD
Director, Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center Biorepository Core
Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Dong graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in biological sciences. He subsequently received his MD from the University of Chicago. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Chicago, where he stayed on as faculty for an additional year as a liver hospitalist. While at the University of Chicago, he trained in the laboratory of Dr. Eugene Chang where he investigated the role of the gut microbiome on microRNAs and colon cancer. He then joined UCLA as a gastroenterology fellow in 2016 and continued his research training at UCLA through the Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) program under the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Pisegna and Dr. Jonathan P. Jacobs. He finished his PhD in molecular, cellular, and integrative physiology in 2020. Dr. Dong is board certified in internal medicine and gastroenterology.

Dr. Dong's research interest involves machine learning and how the intestinal microbiome influences the development of obesity, metabolic syndrome, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. He is currently the director of the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center Repository Core. His clinical interests include cirrhosis, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, alcoholic liver disease, autoimmune hepatitis, and other chronic liver diseases.

Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, PhD 
Associate Professor, Department of Community Health Science, Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA
Associate Director, California Center for Population Research, UCLA
 
Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez' research focuses on population dynamics of health and aging with particular focus in Latin American countries. He studies the link between socioeconomic disadvantage and health from two different angles; first, how socioeconomic disadvantage makes some people die young and populations as a whole have worse health outcomes, and second, how indicators of physiological functioning link with individuals’ health outcomes, disease and disability and with populations overall survival. He co-founded the Latin American Mortality Database, the largest data repository of mortality from 19 countries in Latin America (including data from around 1850). In 2018 he received the early career achievement award from the Population Association of America.

Gilbert C. Gee, PhD
Professor, Department of Community Health Services, Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA

Dr. Gee's research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant minority populations using a multi-level and life course perspective. A primary line of his research focuses on conceptualizing and measuring racial discrimination, and in understanding how discrimination may be related to illness. He has also published more broadly on the topics of stress, neighborhoods, immigration, environmental exposures, occupational health, and on Asian American populations.

Lisa Kilpatrick, PhD
Associate Researcher
G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Kilpatrick graduated from UCLA with a BS with honors in cognitive science and a BS in mathematics. Subsequently, she earned a MA in experimental psychology from Radford University and a PhD in biological sciences from University of California Irvine (UCI). At UCI, she trained with Dr. Larry Cahill, investigating sex differences in the role of the amygdala in emotional memory. Dr. Kilpatrick returned to UCLA to train with Drs. Bruce Naliboff and Emeran A. Mayer as a postdoctoral fellow, who continued to foster her interest in sex differences in the neurobiological correlates of emotional processes, including pain, stress, and resilience, in the context of irritable bowel syndrome and other pain conditions.

Her work has focused on the brain-related aspects of the connection between the brain and body that positively or negatively impact health in multiple research areas with a brain-body aspect, including disrupted brain-gut communication in obesity, brain signatures related to self-body perception before and after cross-sex hormone therapy in transgender individuals, facial dysmorphia-brain morphological relationships in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder due to prenatal alcohol exposure, and the impact of mind-body interventions on brain functional organization in late-life depression. Further, she has sought to understand the influence of sex on brain-body dysregulation, as an important step towards tailoring effective and beneficial therapies to the individual.

Jennifer S. Labus, PhD 
Director, Integrative Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core, G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center
Adjunct Professor of Medicine
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Labus is the director for the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core in the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. She has made seminal contributions to mapping neural networks underlying visceral pain and elucidating brain-gut–microbiome axis in humans. Dr. Labus is an applied statistician with expertise in biostatistics, bioinformatics, treatment-outcome research, multimodal brain imaging, microbiome, metabolomics, and multi-omics integrative analysis using systems biology approaches including machine learning and network analysis. Her current research focused is on determining biological markers (e.g., brain, microbiome, metabolomics, cytokines, and microRNA) of disease, including chronic pain, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease. Using state-or-the-art computational, biostatistical, and bioinformatics approaches, she assesses the interaction between various levels of biological data (e.g. microbiota, metabolites, immune markers, multimodal brain imaging data) with clinical data. The overall goal of this systems-based approach is to identify and target the key regulators of multi’omics-biological disease-interaction networks in order to understand the pathophysiological mechanisms and provide new targets for treatment.

Rachel Sarnoff, MD
Health Sciences Clinical Instructor of Medicine
Division of General Internal Medicine
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Sarnoff graduated with honors from Brown University with a concentration in human health and biology. Between college and medical school, she worked in Dr. Jeffrey Friedman’s lab at Rockefeller University, where she investigated genetic enhancer proteins for leptin hormone. She completed medical school at NYU Langone School of Medicine, where she was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society as a student role model for compassionate medical care. At NYU, she worked under the mentorship of Dr. Martin Blaser, investigating connections between the gut microbiome and precancerous colon polyps that was featured on CBS News. Dr. Sarnoff completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at UCLA, where her passion for teaching, communication, and innovation in medical education and patient care led her to receive multiple teaching and young investigator awards. Primed by her microbiome work and ignited by the complex patients she saw during her residency, her interest in the gut environment expanded to disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBI). 

After chief year, Dr. Sarnoff partnered with her closest mentor, Dr. Lin Chang, to create a physician-scientist training program for herself with the goal of developing a DGBI niche within primary care. To learn how to design and critique clinical trials in the DGBI space, she is completing a master of science in clinical research, for which she has been granted Department of Medicine IGNITE funds. She is also a Career Enhancement Core scholar within the Chang-Mayer SCORE NIH grant, where she is designing her own studies as well as recruiting for clinical trials. Her research is also supported in part by the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. She has been awarded support for the rest of her clinical and research training by the Department of Medicine. Clinically, she practices as a primary care provider at Internal Medicine Suites, where she trains residents and medical students. Finally, she trains under DGBI specialists such as Dr. Chang as well as the Integrative GI interdisciplinary care team. She is most interested in identifying factors that influence risk of developing DGBI, such as early life adversity, psychological comorbidity, and microbiome changes. 

Dr. Sarnoff is board certified in internal medicine. She is dual appointed by the divisions of general internal medicine and digestive diseases. 

May Wang, PhD
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA
Director, Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate Program in Food Services, UCLA
 
Dr. Wang's research focuses on social and physical environmental influences on child nutrition, growth and health, and the contributions of policies, systems and the environment to nutrition and well-being. She is especially interested in addressing social disparities in child nutrition and the well-being of migrant families with a global perspective, and in applying systems science methods to advancing translational obesity-related research.

Michelle Binod, MD, MPH
Pediatric Gastroenterology Fellow
Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition

Dr. Binod graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in molecular and cell biology and minor in ethnic studies. There she did clinical research with Dr. Allison Harvey’s Sleep and Psychological Disorders Lab and Dr. Matthew Walker’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab. She received her MD/MPH from St. George's University. As part of her MPH, she did an internship at the California Department of Public Health to develop a policy platform for Trauma-Informed Practices as part of the Essentials for Childhood Initiative. She completed her pediatric residency at Rutgers Health Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. She joined UCLA in 2023 as a pediatric gastroenterology fellow and started her research training under the NIH T32 Gastroenterology training grant with the mentorship of Dr. Arpana Church and Dr. Tien S. Dong. Dr. Binod is board certified in pediatrics. Dr. Binod's research interest involves studying the role of ACE and sleep dysfunction on the brain-gut axis and its effect on irritable bowel syndrome severity. 

Moheb Yani, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Yani received his PhD in movement science and postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the University of Southern California (USC). While at USC, his research focused on cortical control of muscles, neuroimaging of resting brain function, and targeting brain and muscle function with cortical neuromodulation in patients with urologic chronic pelvic pain. To expand his chronic pain research, Dr. Yani joins the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center as a postdoctoral scholar. He will employ a systems biology approach to investigate visceral pain pathophysiology. By focusing on sex differences in brain-gut interactions, Dr. Yani hopes to identify sex-driven multisystem pain mechanisms and develop novel and targeted neuromodulation interventions for patients with disorders of brain-gut interactions.  Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. Yani taught didactic courses spanning research, scientific inquiry, evidence-based practice, and motor learning and control in the Department of Physical Therapy at Chapman University.

---

Xiaobei Zhang, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
 
Dr. Zhang received her PhD in psychology from the University of Southern California. Her studies were focused on brain mechanisms involved in monetary and food decision-making. Her dissertation examined the impact of nutritive and non-nutritive sweeteners on value-tracking, food decisions and nutrition pathways in the brain.