Yuheng joined UNC Chapel Hill NRI in January 2025 as a doctoral student in Nutrition. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Clinical Nutrition from the University of California, Davis, and his Master of Science in Biochemical and Molecular Nutrition from Tufts University. At the Nutrition Research Institute, Yuheng works closely with Dr. Susan Sumner and Dr. Blake Rushing, focusing on precision nutrition and metabolomics.

Rachel Joined the UNC Chapel Hill NRI in August 2020 as a Research Technician in the Sumner Lab. As a local of Rowan County, specifically China Grove, she graduated from Catawba College in 2020 with a B.S. in Biochemistry. She has always wanted to have some kind of involvement at the NCRC ever since she saw the campus being built as a little girl. Since joining Sumner’s lab, Coble returned to school to further her education. Pursuing her Master's degree in Informatics and Analytics with a Bioinformatics concentration has been a transformative journey, significantly enhancing her expertise in handling and interpreting complex data sets. By learning analytical techniques and informatics tools, she is equipped to process vast amounts of metabolomic data with greater accuracy and efficiency. The skills and knowledge gained through her Master's program enable her to contribute more to her metabolomics research, drive impactful data-driven insights, and support the NRI's goals in advancing metabolomics.

Susan McRitchie, MA/MS has over 10 years of experience conducting biostatistics in the field of metabolomics, and has over 15 years of experience using biostatistics in clinical and epidemiology investigations. She is the lead biostatistician and program manager for the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center (PI, Susan Sumner) for the Nutrition for Precision Health study, for the NIEHS Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource program (MPI, Sumner/Du/Fennell), and for the Metabolomics and Exposome Laboratory at the UNC Chapel Hill Nutrition Research Institute (Director, Sumner). In these roles, she participates in working groups of the NIH consortium involving data management, data quality, and omics analysis, and leads data analysis. She has trained over 20 students, postdoctoral fellows, early career and senior faculty to conduct statistical and multivariate analysis in metabolomics investigations. Susan McRitchie earned a MA in mathematics from UCLA and a MS in Biostatistics from UNC Chapel Hill.

Wimal Pathmasiri, PhD  is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Nutrition Research Institute (NRI).  An overarching goal of Dr. Pathmasiri’ s research includes understanding the links between exposures (diet, constituents in natural projects, environmental chemicals, drugs), microbial metabolism, and human health. He was worked with the Sumner-Lab for over 12 years, as the director of a technology core for the NIH Common Fund Eastern Regional Comprehensive Metabolomics Resource Core (ERCMRC), and as a co-investigator in the North Carolina Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource Untargeted Analysis Laboratory (NC HHEAR UAL). Learn more.