Rate My Professor Sally Eldeghaidy

Sally Eldeghaidy is an Associate Professor in Nutritional Neuroimaging in the School of Biosciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Nottingham. She earned her PhD in 2009 from the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre at the University of Nottingham, where her multi-disciplinary research bridged MR imaging techniques with food sciences, developing methods to explore taste, flavour, and oral fat perception, as well as the influence of taste phenotype on cortical responses to fat. After her PhD, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Physics in Egypt for four years. In 2014, she returned to the University of Nottingham as a postdoctoral fellow at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre to investigate the central mechanisms of thermal taste status using multimodal neuroimaging techniques. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Anne McLaren research fellowship to study mouth-brain-gut interactions in response to fat intake aimed at tackling obesity, employing novel MR imaging techniques. She was appointed Assistant Professor in Nutritional Neuroimaging in the School of Biosciences in 2021 and promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. Additionally, she holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education and achieved Fellow of the Higher Education Academy status in 2022.

Her research utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural mechanisms underlying food intake, choice, and consumption, with a focus on sensory-brain-gut interactions regulating appetite and satiety. She examines alterations in the gut-brain axis in clinical populations, including those with type 2 diabetes, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. Key research areas encompass protein digestion comparing in vitro and in vivo human models, neural pathways for oral and intestinal sweet sensing in type 2 diabetes, brain perception of food stimuli such as taste, texture, aroma, and visuals, and the impact of taste phenotype and genotype on food perception, preference, and choice. She develops advanced MRI methods for simultaneous brain and gut imaging to elucidate physiological mechanisms of the gut-brain axis. Notable publications include 'Mechanisms of umami taste perception: From molecular level to brain imaging' (2021), 'The cortical response to the oral perception of fat emulsions and the effect of taster status' (2011, Journal of Neurophysiology), 'Prior consumption of a fat meal in healthy adults modulates the brain's response to fat' (2016, Journal of Nutrition), 'Thermal taster status: Evidence of cross-modal integration' (2016, Human Brain Mapping), and 'Mapping brain activity of gut-brain signaling to appetite and satiety in healthy adults: A systematic review and functional neuroimaging meta-analysis' (2022). Her contributions advance nutritional neuroimaging and understanding of eating behaviors.