Envirome Institute Welcomes Two New NIEHS-funded T32 Fellows

A competitive NIEHS-funded training award brings two early-career scientists into the Institute’s work at the intersection of environment and human health.

The Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute has secured two training positions through its NIEHS-funded T32 program, a competitive award that supports mentored research, coursework and career development for the next generation of environmental health scientists.

A T32, formally the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, is NIH’s main mechanism for funding research training at an institution. What sets it apart from a typical research grant is who it’s built for. Instead of funding a single project, NIH funds the institution to grow a pipeline of scientists in a defined field. For the Envirome Institute, that field is environmental health: understanding how the world around us shapes our health and turning that knowledge into ways to protect and enhance health. Fellows get a structured mix of faculty-mentored research, technical training, professional development and career preparation, all aimed at launching independent scientific careers.

Landing two positions in a single cycle is a real vote of confidence in the Institute’s mentoring team and its standing as a hub for this kind of work.

Meet the fellows

Dr. Isaiah Burciaga

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Our incoming Postdoctoral fellow is Dr. Isaiah Burciaga, a scientist whose story is rooted in Kentucky. A first-generation college student from Monroe County, he earned all three of his degrees (bachelor’s, master’s, and a PhD in Biology) at the University of Louisville, graduating cum laude as an undergraduate. He arrived on campus planning to become a physician, but a research opportunity in his junior year changed his direction, and he has been building a research career ever since.

His doctoral work centered on a powerful idea in modern medicine, that the roots of adult disease often reach back to our earliest environmental exposures. Working in the lab of Dr. Cynthia Corbitt, Burciaga studied how prenatal exposure to cigarette smoke makes offspring more vulnerable later in life to a diet high in fat and fructose, a “two-hit” model of metabolic disease. The research spanned the full toolkit of modern biology, from animal behavior studies to multi-omic analysis of liver and fat tissue, and it drew national attention. He presented at the Society of Toxicology, the American Physiology Summit and ABRCMS. He took first place at Research!Louisville, and his doctoral research was supported by an NIH award. Along the way, he managed and mentored a team of undergraduate and master’s students, several of whom are now pursuing biomedical careers of their own.

As a T32 fellow, Burciaga is turning to a question at the very center of the Institute’s mission, how does urban greening protect the heart? A growing body of evidence shows that people who live around more greenery tend to have lower cardiovascular risk, but the why is still unfolding. Part of the answer may be in the air itself. Trees and plants release biogenic volatile organic compounds, including monoterpenes such as α-pinene and limonene, that carry anti-inflammatory and vasoprotective properties. Working with the Green Heart Louisville Project, the Institute’s first-of-its-kind community greening trial, which has planted more than 8,000 trees and shrubs across several South Louisville neighborhoods and enrolled nearly a thousand residents in the HEAL clinical study since 2018. Burciaga will measure these plant-derived compounds in participants and test whether they track better heart health. He’ll pair that real-world human data with mechanistic studies in the lab, helping build one of the first large datasets of human exposure to these compounds. It’s a fitting focus for a Kentucky native drawn to the link between healthy communities and the natural world around them.

Burciaga will be mentored by Drs. Aruni Bhatnagar, Daniel J. Conklin and Dan Riggs, whose combined expertise spans cardiovascular biology, inhalation science and environmental epidemiology.

Connect with Dr. Burciaga on LinkedIn.

Brandon Capps II

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Brandon Capps II is an incoming predoctoral fellow and, like Burciaga, a first-generation college graduate with Kentucky roots. Capps came to the University of Louisville from Murray State University, where he earned his bachelor’s in biological sciences, and is now a PhD student in physiology and biophysics, earning his master’s in the department along the way. A competitive UofL biomedical sciences fellowship supported his first two years of graduate training. He sits in the Department of Physiology, but as his mentor puts it, he is “a toxicologist at heart,” and his early record backs that up.

That record has centered on how nicotine and today’s e-cigarette products affect blood vessels. Capps has studied the vascular effects of synthetic nicotine and newer e-liquids on the aorta and smaller arteries, and how nicotine’s chemical shape affects endothelial function, the health of the cells that line our blood vessels. He has presented that work at regional and national meetings, from the Ohio Valley Society of Toxicology to the NIH Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting, and he is a co-author on a manuscript now under review. An earlier project, investigating how medications affect certain behaviors in developing zebrafish, earned him a second-place award at the Kentucky INBRE conference.

Where Burciaga’s project looks at how urban greening can protect the heart, Capps’s looks at how toxic exposures can harm it. He will be working in the lab of mentor Daniel J. Conklin, PhD, FAHA, whose lab studies the cardiovascular effects of environmental exposures. Capps studies the mechanisms by which inhaled toxicants such as volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter present in e-cigarette aerosols, wildfire smoke and air pollution injure the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems. His T32 research zeroes in on a single molecular sensor, the TRPA1 channel, and its role in that injury, using precise genetic mouse models to test how one pollutant, in particular, formaldehyde, drives vascular damage and hardens the arteries. This research will have direct real-world stakes, looking at exposures from vaping to wildfire smoke and airborne pollutants, all which reach more people every year.

Longer term, Capps hopes to bridge the laboratory and the clinic together as a medical science liaison, translating complex science for the clinicians who put it to use.

Building the pipeline

More than a funding milestone, the T32 is a reminder of what the Envirome Institute is here to do. Fellows work side by side with established investigators and build the skills that come with running a lab of their own one day. Scientific writing, grant development, presenting at national meetings and mentoring the students coming up behind them. It is how a field renews itself and builds the talent pool who will push the boundaries of their chosen fields and ultimately train the next generation of researchers.

We’re glad to welcome our newest fellows, and we look forward to sharing the knowledge their research uncovers, ensuring the discoveries made here in Louisville keep rippling outward to improve lives across the world.