Dr. Sabiha. I am so excited for you, and to see what you do next. I know you are going to accomplish great things.

2021 was a big year, made no less big by bringing on my first graduate students into the lab. Sabiha joined the lab in the summer 2021 and decided to quickly pursue work on Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). To her credit, we wanted to meld her previous expertise in Nutrition with my work on FXS, the most common genetic form of autism. This was going to be no small task. I am not an expert in nutrition, the microbiome or ionomics, yet Sabiha heartily took on the task of learning more about these areas very quickly. Indeed within mere months of joining the lab she was already writing a review article on the effect of diet in the treatment of autism which was published in 2022 – check it out here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.1031016/full. It is already highly cited!

Speaking of her willingness to learn and span disciplines, Sabiha has traveled to many different conferences to present her work. Above, she joined the lab in our first trip to the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. She has also presented at the Winter Brain conference, ABRCMS, SfN (again in DC), and many other conferences. She has two more papers that are currently under review and I’m confident will be published in the next year – check out the preprints here:

Work on elemental composition across tissues in FXS mice: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.27.702117v1

Work on microbiome, gut barrier markers and physiology: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.17.712468v1

She was also instrumental in us getting our COBRE funding from the Oklahoma Center for Microbiome Research helping to put together the proposal and gathering all of the preliminary data.

I know Sabiha is going to do really cool science whatever she does next and whoever hires her will be lucky to have her (she’s on the job market if anyone has postdocs available!).