Student and faculty researchers in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion moved into new laboratory and research facilities on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus Monday.
The new facilities are located on the first two floors of the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative building on the north corner of Fifth and Van Buren streets near the Mercado complex. The laboratories are moving to the Downtown campus from the Polytechnic campus in Mesa as a part of ASU President Michael Crow’s efforts to move the university’s medical programs to Phoenix.
“We are absolutely thrilled,” said Carol Johnston, associate director of the nutrition program. “We do a lot of human research.”
ASU’s nutrition program has approximately 800 students, Johnston said. There are more than 100 graduate students in the nutrition and exercise and wellness programs.
“To get your graduate degrees, you have to conduct research. We have a very impressive research faculty, so we have to have labs. We had been working out of our Poly labs until January,” Johnston said.
The facilities are prepared for graduate students to conduct physical assessments related to nutrition and wellness. Students are able to test blood and urine samples in the full chemistry lab spaces, as well as prepare meals in the metabolic kitchen for nutrition-related research.
Among the equipment housed in the new facility is an a DEXA machine, an X-ray machine that can check a person’s entire skeletal bone density and body fat distribution. In weight loss studies, it can indicate the location and amount of fat loss, Johnston said.
“I think we’ll be able to entice students to go into research,” Johnston said. “This is all very, very cool.”
Jessica Knurick is a graduate student and the principal investigator on a study seeking to answer a number of questions about vegetarianism, veganism and omnivorism and their relationship with body fat.
“We are recruiting 90 individuals. We have a vegetarian group which is plant-based eaters but they consume dairy products and eggs, and then we have a vegan group. They don’t eat meat, dairy or eggs. Then we have an omnivore group which are your typical meat eaters,” Knurick said. “We’re going to measure a series of things like blood pressure.”
Knurick expects the study, which began on Monday, to run through March.
Knurick said nine students, including both graduate and undergraduate students, will be working with her study.
Sarah Wherry is a graduate student studying the bone metabolism and health of those in Knurick’s study. Wherry, who focuses on physical wellness, has a study of her own beginning in February. She plans to use Wii Fit to improve the health of middle-aged women.
Other studies that students are working on include several that focus in diabetes.
The laboratories at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative will have an open house event on Feb. 11 from 3-5 p.m.
Contact the reporter at Ashley.McCulley@asu.edu
