BIRCWH SCHOLARS
Assistant Professor, UIC Department of Family and Community Medicine
Hunter Holt, MD, MAS is a board-certified family medicine physician, Assistant Professor in the UIC Department of Family and Community Medicine. Dr. Holt is focused on researching and implementing solutions that improve patient experiences and health outcomes related to reproductive health and cervical cancer prevention. In medical school, at Rush University, Dr. Holt traveled to China as a NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellow to research cervical cancer prevention in China. Working with the Cancer Institute of China, Dr. Holt investigated cervical cancer screening in Chinese migrant workers and post-menopausal Chinese women. As a family medicine resident at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Dr. Holt was a part of the Global Health Track working in Senegal to implement sustainable solutions for cervical cancer prevention in rural Senegal. As a Primary Care Research Fellow at UCSF, Dr. Holt completed his master’s degree in Clinical and Epidemiological Research and worked to understand the reasons behind disparities in cervical cancer incidence and mortality. Currently, Dr. Holt is working to finding solutions to reduce these cervical cancer disparities and promote health equity.
Assistant Professor in Kinesiology and Nutrition
Kelsey Gabel RD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Kinesiology and Nutrition. She received her Masters and PhD in Human Nutrition from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Dr. Gabel has been studying intermittent fasting for almost a decade and has emerged a leader in the field. Specifically, her research is focused on how intermittent fasting may mitigate weight gain and adiposity, adverse effects, and metabolic dysregulation during anti-tumor treatment for breast cancer. Additionally, she is interested in how different modalities of exercise, combined with diet, may improve cognitive decline in older adults with obesity, and how these outcomes may vary by sex. As a BIRCWH scholar, Dr. Gabel will continue to explore how nutrition interventions with and without physical activity affect body weight, adiposity, and cardiometabolic health during treatment in females diagnosed with breast cancer. She will develop her transdisciplinary work to include a larger breadth of factors that impact quality of life during treatment, as well as expand her work to breast cancer survivors and other cancers that primarily affect women.
Victoria S. Lee, MD is an Assistant Professor in the UIC Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. She is a board-certified otolaryngologist and fellowship-trained sinus and skull base surgeon with a tertiary academic practice focused on treating patients with sinonasal pathology. Dr. Lee is highly experienced in rhinologic outcomes research, completing a dedicated T32-funded research training year during residency. Her current research efforts are focused on health disparities, exploring the effects of social (e.g., socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and sex) and physical (e.g., environment) determinants of health on sinonasal disease, and she has received peer-reviewed grant funding to support this work. Epidemiological data on sex-specific differences in particular for sinonasal conditions are limited. At the cellular level, estrogen has been shown to activate pathways that underlie sinonasal inflammatory conditions. As a BIRCWH Program Scholar, the overarching goal of her research is to explore sex-specific differences in patients with inflammatory sinonasal conditions at the epidemiological level. She seeks to characterize sex-specific differences in clinical presentation, disease severity, treatment choice/decision-making, and outcome improvement, in patients with sinonasal disease.
Rebecca Campbell, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology in the UIC School of Public Health Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She earned her MSPH and PhD in
International Health with a focus in Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in
pediatric environmental health, during which she conducted research on effects of maternal prenatal psychosocial stress on child cognitive development using pregnancy cohort studies. Dr. Campbell’s
experiences converge on pregnancy, nutrition, and the maternal-placental-fetal interface as critical for fetal development and the long-term health of the maternal-child dyad. Her current research aims to identify risk factors and mechanisms for fetal iron deficiency. As a BIRCWH Scholar, Dr. Campbell aims to develop a translational research program that bridges preclinical and epidemiologic research methods to understand the mechanisms by which maternal prenatal stress constrains fetal iron accrual and the role of fetal sex as a moderator. She seeks to translate these mechanistic insights into targets and approaches for interventions that will protect fetal iron accrual, improve child health and development, and promote health equity.