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Associate Professor
UNC Chapel Hill
Saame "Raz" Shaikh is an Associate Professor and an Associate Chair in the Department of Nutrition at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Dr. Shaikh received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in Medical Biophysics in 2004. He completed his postdoctoral training in Immunology at The Johns Hopkins University in 2008. Prior to joining UNC in 2017, Dr. Shaikh was an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. In 2012, he was awarded the Early Career Award from the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids for his research on membrane structure-function. In 2018, he received an award for his research related to immunity from the American Society for Nutrition. Dr. Shaikh is currently funded by the NIH and industry groups.
Dr. Shaikh has more than 10 years of experience as a researcher, who specializes in the study of how dietary fatty acids and their metabolites control inflammatory, infectious, and metabolic responses in obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Shaikh's lab has extensively studied how dietary n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids control the formation of distinct signaling structures known as lipid rafts of lymphocytes using mouse models and cell culture approaches. In addition, he has addressed how the lipid known as cardiolipin controls mitochondrial structure-function using biomimetic membranes and rodent models. Currently, Dr. Shaikh is focused on understanding how metabolites synthesized from dietary n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, known as specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators (SPMs), control the inflammatory response to viral infection, obesity and environmental exposures. Most of this work is using mouse models and collecting samples from humans with obesity and those undergoing gastric bypass surgery. A newer area of study in his lab is establishing how SPMs control glucose homeostasis in a sex- and genotype-specific manner using diversity outbred mice and other models of obesity heterogeneity. Dr. Shaikh is also conducting two clinical trial focused on dietary supplements and inflammation.