Bioinformatics rockstar, Lola Holcomb, successfully defended her PhD dissertation today on “Anti-Inflammatory Interactions between Gut Microbiota and Broccoli Sprouts”!!!!
Holcomb, Lola. “Anti-Inflammatory Interactions between Gut Microbiota and Broccoli Sprouts”. (2025). University of Maine. Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation (forthcoming). Presentation.
Lola’s contributions to and leadership in the Ishaq Lab Team have led to numerous publications, presentations, and immeasurable professional growth and camaraderie within the group. Her contributions to our research helped us open a new avenue of focus, sparked the imagination of several undergraduates who are now involved in research, and improved the mood and collegiality of the research group with her humor, insightfulness, and poignant questions. Lola has been more of a colleague than a trainee, and the lab is delighted to see how much she’s grown as a researcher. Lola is currently searching for positions as a postdoctoral researcher, bioinformatician, or Assistant Professor at an undergraduate-focused university or college. She’ll continue to collaborate with the Ishaq Lab, as we have multiple manuscripts in review or in preparation for peer review on which she is an author.
Lola has been a very successful graduate student and has been featured in UMaine news articles: she has been the first author on a publication in 2023 on broccoli in an early-life mouse model of Crohn’s Disease, is co-first author on a broccoli sprout diet paper in review, contributed to another publication in 2023 in broccoli sprouts in a mouse model of ulcerative colitis, she won a graduate student research award from the Bioscience Association of Maine in 2024/2025, won a poster competition at a BioME research showcase in 2024, and has presented her research in Maine, California, and South Africa!
Lola Holcomb, B.S., PhD
Lola entered as a rotating first-year student in March 2022 in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering program, and declared the Ishaq Lab her dissertation lab soon after, and starting in fall of 2022 was accepted into the NRT funded for One Health in the Environment program. Troubled with indecisiveness and the desire to research, well, everything, she quickly found that using bioinformatics and big data as a lens to study microbial ecology (and in time, its relation to social equity) allowed her to do the kind of meaningful interdisciplinary research she’s always wanted to do. Lola performed 16S data analysis for multiple lab projects and developed a metagenomic analysis workflow to compare gut microbiomes of mouse models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease with broccoli as a dietary treatment. In addition to research, she instructed a graduate-level Genetics course, assisted in Dr. Ishaq’s 16S DNA Sequence Data Analysis course, tutored several Biology undergraduate students, and served as a GSBSE senator in the Graduate Student Government here at UMaine.
The Ishaq Lab 