Tag: PhD defense

Lola Holcomb successfully defends her dissertation!

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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!

Portrait of Lola Holcomb, wearing a block sweater on a beach at sunset

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. 

Google Scholar page.

Congratulations to Dr. Tolu Esther Alaba for passing her PhD Defense!

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The Ishaq Lab is ecstatic to announce that Dr. Tolu Esther Alaba has successfully defended her PhD dissertation on the antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in broccoli sprout diets and their relation to health, officially completing her PhD!!! You can check out the recording of her talk here, which was attended by >40 people over Zoom.

The committee was impressed by her breadth of knowledge, ability to think abstractly about future research, plans for research designs and integrating technology into education, and enthusiasm for using food as medicine. Dr. Alaba will enjoy a very-well-earned summer break before considering postdoctoral research options in the fall, and we are thrilled to keep working with her!

Tolu has been researching the benefits of cruciferous vegetables on health, and especially the benefits by antioxidants or anti-inflammatories we get from these plants. Some of these compounds are available directly from the plants, and some of them are produced or made available through the biochemistry of certain bacteria that live in our gut. Depending on the type of vegetable, and the way that it is cooked/prepared, you can end up with different types and quantities of these beneficial compounds.

Cruciferous vegetables or their purified compounds can ameliorate inflammatory symptoms through multiple pathways. Graphic designed by Johanna Holman.
Headshot for Esther Alaba, PhD Candidate in Biomedical Sciences

Tolu Esther Alaba has been a PhD Candidate in the Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering at UMaine. She previously completed her bachelors of technology at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, in Ogbomosho Nigeria in 2011, and her masters of science at the University of Ibadan, in Ibadan, Nigeria in 2015.

She started her PhD at UMaine in the fall of 2019, just a few months before the pandemic, and during her PhD she weathered the pandemic, an advisor leaving, leaving an advisor, navigating university policy and advocating for herself, being a mentor in STEM, being a teaching assistant, raising a family, moving across the country, and learning entirely new research skills. This has been a difficult journey, but Tolu has risen to every challenge, become a competent interdisciplinary researcher and added an entirely new dimension of research to our work.

Her research has focused on antioxidants in fruits and vegetables which can be used to resolve inflammation, oxidative stress, injury, cardiometabolic and chronic diseases. She joined #TeamBroccoli last September, and in less than a year, completed a literature review which was recently published in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition, she has completed metabolomics for mouse studies for two manuscripts in preparation, and completed a nutritional analysis for a human study for a manuscript in development. The Ishaq Lab is proud of her strength in standing up for herself as an employee and a researcher, as well as of the incredible work she’s added to our team.

Publications

  1. Tolu E. Alaba, Johanna M. Holman , Suzanne L. Ishaq, Yanyan Li. 2024. Current knowledge on the preparation and benefits of cruciferous vegetables as relates to in vitro, in vivo, and clinical models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.  Current Developments in Nutrition 8(5):102160.
  2. In preparation: Early life intervention with broccoli sprouts affects serum and gut metabolites.
  3. In preparation: Healthy eating habits and effects of consuming steamed broccoli sprouts daily for a month.

Presentations

Alaba*, T.E., Ishaq, S.L., Li, Y., Zhang, T. “Broccoli sprouts alleviate ulcerative colitis in mice by increasing dietary and microbial metabolites: differential effects in young and adult, male and female mice. 4th CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM), La Jolla, CA, March 12th – 14th, 2024.

Tolu Esther Alaba is standing in front of a science conference poster, smiling, and holding her infant.

Tolu Esther Alaba sets a date for her PhD Defense!

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The Ishaq Lab is delighted to announce that Tolu Esther Alaba will soon be defending her PhD dissertation on the antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in broccoli sprout diets and their relation to health. Her dissertation will be presented over Zoom on June 25, 2024, from 2 – 3 pm EDT, which is open to the public. Registration is free but required here.

Tolu has been researching the benefits of cruciferous vegetables on health, and especially the benefits by antioxidants or anti-inflammatories we get from these plants. Some of these compounds are available directly from the plants, and some of them are produced or made available through the biochemistry of certain bacteria that live in our gut. Depending on the type of vegetable, and the way that it is cooked/prepared, you can end up with different types and quantities of these beneficial compounds.

Cruciferous vegetables or their purified compounds can ameliorate inflammatory symptoms through multiple pathways. Graphic designed by Johanna Holman.

Headshot for Esther Alaba, PhD Candidate in Biomedical Sciences

Tolu Esther Alaba is a PhD Candidate in the GSBSE program at UMaine. Her research has focused on antioxidants in fruits and vegetables which can be used to resolve inflammation, oxidative stress, injury, cardiometabolic and chronic diseases. She joined #TeamBroccoli in the fall of 2023, and in less than a year, completed a dissertation’s-worth of research, including performing metabolomics and related data analyses on gut metabolites and broccoli sprouts in mice and humans, and drafting several manuscripts, and publishing literature review (details below) — and all this was on top of moving to California with her family, giving birth to her second child, Bethel, and extricating herself from the punitive environment of her former lab. The Ishaq Lab is proud of her strength in standing up for herself as an employee and a researcher, as well as of the incredible work she’s added to our team.

Publications

  1. Tolu E. Alaba, Johanna M. Holman , Suzanne L. Ishaq, Yanyan Li. 2024. Current knowledge on the preparation and benefits of cruciferous vegetables as relates to in vitro, in vivo, and clinical models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.  Current Developments in Nutrition 8(5):102160.
  2. In preparation: Early life intervention with broccoli sprouts affects serum and gut metabolites.
  3. In preparation: Healthy eating habits and effects of consuming steamed broccoli sprouts daily for a month.

Presentations

Tolu Esther Alaba is standing in front of a science conference poster, smiling, and holding her infant.

Alaba*, T.E., Ishaq, S.L., Li, Y., Zhang, T. “Broccoli sprouts alleviate ulcerative colitis in mice by increasing dietary and microbial metabolites: differential effects in young and adult, male and female mice. 4th CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM), La Jolla, CA, March 12th – 14th, 2024.