Join us for our upcoming NASH Symposium!

Sri’s background is in Pharmaceuticals and Fine Chemicals and he received his PhD in Food Science and Human Nutrition from Colorado State University. Before joining Research Diets, Sri was a Post-doctoral Scholar in the Department of Food Science, Pennsylvania State University. He has worked with both in vitro and in vivo (mouse and pig) models to screen, evaluate toxicity, study efficacy, and potency of anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer phytochemicals. His background provides him strong credentials and a unique perspective to assist researchers with their laboratory animal diet formulation needs and he has thoroughly enjoyed helping and collaborating with researchers on different diet induced phenotypes in the last seven years at Research Diets, Inc.

Dr. Arion Kennedy is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Structural Biochemistry at North Carolina State University. She earned her PhD in nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and completed her postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University where she researched immunometabolism in adipose tissue and liver. By using genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, her research examines the impact of carbohydrates and lipids on macrophage function and explores antigen driven pathways responsible for T cell activation in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in animal models and humans. Areas of expertise include immunology, obesity, diabetes, inflammation, and lipid metabolism.

Dr. Harmeet Malhi is Professor of Medicine and Physiology at Mayo Clinic. She attended medical school at the University College of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India. Her research interest is in mechanisms of liver injury and inflammation with a specific focus on nonalcoholic steatohepatitis pathogenesis, including biomarker development in nonalcoholic and alcoholic steatohepatitis. Dr. Malhi currently serves as a deputy editor for Hepatology and on the editorial board of Hepatology Communications. She has published over 90 peer-reviewed manuscripts, editorials and book chapters and has served as a reviewer for numerous journals, including Hepatology and the Journal of Lipid Research.Dr. Malhi is the principal investigator of two NIH grants and several foundation grants. She is on study section for the American Liver Foundation, AGA, AASLD, and a standing member of Hepatobiliary Pathophysiology study section of the Center for Scientific Review, NIH. Intramurally, she serves as Associate Chair for Research in the Division.

Trained as a Medical Doctor and Specialist in Internal Medicine at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Dr. Vacca underwent a PhD in molecular biology in the Lab of Antonio Moschetta (Mario Negri Sud) and University of Chieti-Pescara. Dr. Vacca was therefore appointed at the MRC Human Nutrition Research and the University of Cambridge as Clinician Scientist, working also as a Consultant at the Cambridge University Hospitals in the Lipids/NASH Services, where he joined teams led by world-leading experts in obesity/lipotoxicity (Antonio Vidal-Puig) and nutrition/metabolomics (Jules Griffin). He is currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine at the University of Bari (IT) and Principal Investigator at the Roger Williams Institute of Hepatology (London, UK).Dr. Vacca’s track record falls in the field of systemic/hepatic metabolism in the context of obesity/NASH/HCC with expertise in pre-clinical and translational studies, functional genomics, and systems biology. In the last years, he has made significant accomplishments in the field of obesity/lipotoxicity as drivers of liver disease, as well as in describing the rewiring of cellular metabolism in cancer. Most of his findings have great translational potential for obesity-associated complications including NAFLD, and have been published in highly reputed journals including Nature Metabolism, Gastroenterology, J Hepatology, Hepatology, Cardiovascular Research, Molecular Metabolism and BBA. MV co-leads with Prof Vidal-Puig (Cambridge) and James Perfield (Lilly) the LITMUS pre-clinical group, which has generated a large collection of preclinical NASH models to generate a consensus and develop a coherent preclinical pipeline for reverse translation of novel NASH biomarkers.

Dr. Beasley’s academic training is in environmental microbiology, bacterial diseases, and host pathogen responses. He completed his Ph.D. at Canada’s Western University, researching iron uptake during invasive Staphylococcus aureus infection. He relocated to Southern California for postdoctoral work. At UC San Diego, he developed animal models to evaluate boosting the innate immune system by modulating the host hypoxic response, toward combating blood and urinary tract bacterial infection. At Calibr/The Scripps Research Institute, he ran the in vivo program for early pipeline validation of small molecule drugs against parasitic diseases including malaria, cryptosporidiosis, and filarial nematode diseases. Dr. Beasley forayed into metabolic disease research as an in vivo biologist with the inflammation and NASH startup biotech Jecure Therapeutics, and later served as the Director of Scientific Engagement for cardiovascular and metabolic disease at Crown Bioscience. Fred joined Taconic in 2020 as the Field Application Scientist servicing the Western regions of the USA and Canada.