About the project
Obesity is becoming a global health issue and the understanding how early life environment affects obesity risk is critical to promote healthy lifecourse trajectories. This project aims to investigate how early environment reprogrammes materno-fetal stem cells and obesity risk.
There is now substantial evidence that early life environment is a strong determinant of future disease risk, with epigenetic processes implicated in mediating this altered disease risk. You will help us examine altered in-utero cellular programming underlying reduced offspring obesity risk following prenatal nutritional supplementation preconception and during pregnancy. You will do this by characterising the metabolic and epigenetic landscape of mesenchymal stem cells isolated from infants from the NiPPeR preconception and pregnancy randomised controlled nutritional trial.
You will be part of the prestigious A*STAR Research Attachment Programme (ARAP) which is a collaboration between A*STAR, Singapore (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) and the University of Southampton. You will spend 2 years in Southampton and 2 years in Singapore. Your structured training plan will utilise the expertise of the UK and Singapore supervisory team. You will learn experimental medicine skills such as:
- molecular and bioinformatic aspects of human stem cell biology (Lillycrop, Teo)
- materno-fetal metabolism (Chan)
- nutrition and epidemiology (Godfrey)
External Supervisors
Alongside Professors Lillycrop and Godfrey in Southampton, your supervisors will include:
- Dr Adrian Teo (Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, A*Star, Singapore)
- Professor Shiao-Yng Chan (Singapore Institute of Clinical Sciences, A*Star)
