Annie Gupta, PhD

Arpana Gupta is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience in the Division of Digestive Diseases at UCLA. She completed a PhD degree in Psychology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, followed by an APA accredited clinical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical Center. Her programmatic line of research broadly defined focuses on the bidirectional interactions between the brain and peripheral factors (in particular inflammatory markers and gut microbiota-related metabolites) and how these interactions are modified by vulnerability (early adversity, race, adult stress, socioeconomic status [SES], diet) and protective environmental (resilience, exercise) factors in contributing to the underlying pathophysiology of obesity. She is dedicated to using advanced automated and mathematical analytic techniques, which allows her to integrate information from multiple data sources including multimodal neuroimaging data acquisition and analytic techniques, while accounting for sex and race differences. Her goal is to develop a comprehensive model that provides a powerful and sensitive biomarker that will increase biological readouts of obesity, thus bringing to the forefront those individuals who are at increased risk as a result of disadvantaged backgrounds. In order to pursue this line of research she recently received a K23 grant from NIDDK (NIH) on the “Role of Inflammatory Processes in Reward Network Alterations in Obesity.” Her work has been recognized at various conferences, and most recently her poster on network metrics in obesity won the AGA Poster Judging Competition at the 2016 Digestive Diseases Week (DDW) in San Diego, CA and she is the 2016 Ethan Sims Young Investigator Award recipient for the Obesity Society. Till date she has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles.