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About Nipun
Dr. Nipun Saini is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2015, an MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Essex, Colchester, UK in 2008, and a BE in Biotechnology from Maharishi Dayanand Institute, India in 2007. Prior to her faculty appointment, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in Nutrition at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute and served as a postdoctoral researcher in breast cancer at North Carolina Central University in 2017. Her research investigates the metabolic adaptations that occur in the mother and fetus to support a healthy pregnancy, and how maladaptations to stressors such as alcohol, malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes impair fetal growth and brain development. Dr. Saini focuses on disruptions in macronutrient (glucose and lipid) utilization within the maternal-fetal dyad in alcohol-exposed pregnancies, elucidating consequences for fetal outcomes and long-term offspring health. This work addresses a neglected area in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) research, where maternal metabolism drives fetal growth impairments predictive of cognitive deficits.
Dr. Saini's research is funded by the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). She received the Postdoctoral Award for Research Excellence (PARE) from UNC Chapel Hill in 2022, the 2018 Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders Study Group (FASDSG) Travel Award, and the 2015 Outstanding Animal Care Award from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Key publications include "Alcohol reprograms placental glucose and lipid metabolism which correlate with reduced fetal brain but not body weight in a mouse model of prenatal alcohol exposure" (Journal of Nutrition, 2025), "Alcohol blunts pregnancy-mediated insulin resistance and reduces fetal brain glucose despite elevated fetal gluconeogenesis, and these changes associate with fetal weight outcomes" (FASEB Journal, 2023), "Untargeted metabolome analysis reveals reductions in maternal hepatic glucose and amino acid content that correlate with fetal organ weights in a mouse model of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders" (Nutrients, 2022), "Global metabolomic profiling reveals distinct hepatic metabolite fingerprints of the C57Bl/6J mouse dam and fetus in pregnancy" (Metabolomics, 2021), and "An enriched biosignature of gut microbiota-dependent metabolites characterizes maternal plasma in a mouse model of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder" (Scientific Reports, 2021). She serves as a dissertation committee member for graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill and acts as an ad-hoc reviewer for journals such as Nutrients, Scientific Reports, FASEB Journal, and Alcohol and Alcoholism.
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