Presenting Author
University of California Davis
Jungjae Park is from Seoul, South Korea. He received his B.S. in biochemistry from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. During his undergraduate years, he spent two years working as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Huazhing Shi's research group where he investigated effects of salinity stress in genetic mechanisms of plants using sorghum and he received an undergraduate outstanding performance award from the Department of Biochemistry. Upon graduation, he returned to South Korea to complete his mandatory military service for 2 years. In addition to his background in biochemistry, he has an experience in poultry farm management for multiple years and an intership experience from industry-scale animal pharmaceutical research and development facility working on analyzing and developing feed additives for monogastric animals and developing probiotic products for human. Currently, Jungjae is a second year Ph.D. student in Animal Biology at University of California, Davis in Peng Ji Lab. During his first year of the Ph.D. program, he successfully completed two animal trials. For the first trial, he explored the effect of probiotics on growth performance, diarrhea, and intestinal health of weaned pigs experimentally infected with an enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli. For the second trial, he investigated the effect of dietary inulin and synbiotics (inulin with Lactobacillus agilis) supplements on iron absorption and metabolism in a milk-fed neonatal piglet model. His dissertation work focuses on the impacts of iron nutrition and dietary use of prebiotics and synbiotics on the gut microbiome and metabolism in infants, children, and adolescents using a neonatal piglet model. He is also mastering data and statistical analysis of complex gut microbiome data to understand the effect and the function of iron on host-microbe interactions in neonates. Jungjae's ultimate goal during the Ph.D. program is to further the understanding of 1) the mechanisms revolving iron metabolism and absorption in the early stage of development, 2) the impacts of dietary prebiotics and synbiotics supplemenatations on iron metabolism and absoprtion, and 3) the benefits and risks of the dynamic modulation of gut microbiota by modulating iron bioavailability in the gut.