Nipun Saini, PhD

Nipun Saini was promoted to Assistant Professor of Nutrition in December 2023. She joined the NRI in the summer of 2017 for her second postdoctoral position working with Dr. Smith on fetal alcohol syndrome. She completed her PhD. in Biochemistry from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where her dissertation was focused on the characterization of inhibitors of fatty acid transport protein-2 in cell and animal models to reduce obesity, lipotoxicity and related diseases. After earning her PhD, she moved to the North Carolina Research Campus as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at North Carolina Central University and worked on understanding the mechanism of microRNA-mediated regulation in metformin treated breast cancer cells. Saini’s research interest is to understand the metabolic adaptations that occur in the mother and fetus to support a healthy pregnancy, and how maladaptation to stressors such as alcohol, malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes impairs fetal growth and brain development. Eventually, she would like to translate this mechanistic understanding to the development of nutrition-based interventions for at-risk pregnancies.