Congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Johanna Holman for successfully defending her doctoral dissertation in Microbiology today! The Ishaq Lab will be celebrating together in-person in a few weeks, when we’re all past cold season. In the meantime, Johanna will put the final touches on her thesis, and start converting those chapters into manuscripts for journal publications! She’s also preparing to transition to a postdoctoral research position (details to follow).

The recorded presentation of her work is here, and focuses on her work exploring which gut bacteria metabolize glucosinolates in broccoli sprouts and produce the anti-oxidant sulforaphane, as well as how the do it, and whether they will do it in different circumstances.

Johanna joined my lab in 2020, first as a master’s student in Nutrition, then as a PhD student in Microbiology. She started her research career as a lab tech for some of my long-term collaborators, Yanyan Li and Tao Zhang, back when they were at Husson University in Bangor, Maine. She joined my lab to add microbiology to her existing nutrition and biochemistry background, and at this point, it might be easier to list which projects she hasn’t been a part of. She’s performed bacterial culturing, bacterial community analysis, genomics, transcriptomics, and protein prediction. She’s run diet intervention trials in mice and in people, and she’s trained nearly every student in my lab in the last 6 years in some type of lab work or data analysis. She has been a valuable collaborator on our intricate and lab-heavy projects, allowing the lab to coordinate up to 5 projects and 8 students simultaneously.

Johanna is a brilliant nutritional health microbiologist who uses multi-faceted research – from the lab to public health – to understand the connection between health and the microbiome. She’s led two publications from her masters (a literature review on sulforphane and the immune system, and another on a broccoli sprout diet intervention in mice); co-authored three others (a literature review on cruciferous vegetables, a similar broccoli sprout diet intervention in mice, and a different formulation of the broccoli diet); and has several more manuscripts from her doctoral work that are poised for submission to scientific journals for peer review.

She’s written graduate research proposals for the NIH and USDA. She was awarded the Charles Morris and UMaine grad student award.

She’s been a teaching assistant for chemistry and biology, with an estimated 120 students per year. She’s a graphic designer (Imaginome Designs). She grew a whole human from scratch. She’s keen to learn and has always kept an open mind to new opportunities. Johanna has been instrumental in the knowledge generation and success of my lab, and we are so luck to have been a part of her journey.