Finding Our Motivation to Eat
From a young age, Elizabeth Mietlicki-Baase, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, has been fascinated by what motivates us to eat what we eat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her research focuses on how the brain controls what we eat.
Mietlicki-Baase strives to understand the reward systems of the brain: “How do we choose what we eat, and why are certain foods more or less rewarding?” she asks. Ultimately, she wants to translate her discoveries into treatments for obesity because “available treatments are limited right now,” she adds.
Her current project, funded by an NIH Research Project Grant (R01), focuses on amylin. That’s a pancreatic hormone affecting food intake and motivation to choose appetizing foods, and the brain has numerous receptors for it. A new project “delves further into the mechanisms of how amylin acts in the brain to control intake,” Mietlicki-Baase explains, “especially looking at how this interacts with the types of food eaten and with sex differences.”
During her college years, Mietlicki-Baase became interested in the neurobiology of eating and trained in biochemistry and psychology. Her grad training in behavioral neuroscience at UB focused on the intersection of feeding and drinking. As a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, she examined the intricacies of the brain’s mesolimbic pathway, sometimes referred to as the “reward pathway,” to find out how hormones act on it.
“There’s so much we don’t understand,” Mietlicki-Baase says, “about why a single hormone can affect what we eat and how much fluid we take in.”
Mietlicki-Baase is intrigued by interdisciplinary trends in her field, noting the work of the UB Ingestive Behavior Community, a “large group of researchers who study behaviors like feeding and drinking at multiple levels.”
Trying to join forces with researchers in other fields is a growing interest for her, which might explain a UB Blue Sky Coin project Mietlicki-Baase is involved in, together with investigators in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Biochemistry. She’s looking at the effects of microplastics—tiny pieces of plastic shed off items like plastic bags or plastic dishes—on eating and drinking behavior.
Mietlicki-Baase feels privileged to have been a research associate and post-doc at UPenn, but as a Buffalo native, she always wanted to get back to UB in a faculty position. She did that in 2016 and recently was promoted from assistant to associate professor. While research is her passion, teaching comes in a close second.
“During my post-doc training, I was fortunate to have a mentor who was open to my pursuing my interest in teaching,” she recalls. Today, Mietlicki-Baase is teaching a graduate-level micronutrients class. She has also developed a nutritional neuroscience course, which will run this fall, for the Undergraduate Nutrition program.
Mietlicki-Baase’s goal as a teacher is to help students realize that scientists are “everyday people who decided to pursue a passion. I also tell them that science and our knowledge of it change. Perhaps you can bring a new perspective.”