Basic science research spotlight: Brittany Needham, PhD

As someone with a wide variety of interests, Brittany Needham, PhD, would have been happy studying any number of things. She kept her options open until a lab rotation during her first year of graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin introduced her to microbiology. Graduating with a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from UT Austin in 2014, Needham went on to complete postdoctoral research at Caltech, where she studied the relationship between bacteria in the gut microbiome and altered brain activity and behavior. Since joining IU School of Medicine and the Stark Neurosciences Institute in 2022, Needham, assistant professor of anatomy, cell biology and physiology, has continued her research investigating the bacteria that live in the human intestine: what they eat, what they make and how they influence human health, particularly the brain.

What makes studying the gut microbiome so interesting?
I’m very interested in the complex community that we call the gut microbiome—it’s so dense, and there’s so much going on in this community that’s inside of us our entire life. In recent years, there has been a great deal of excitement surrounding gut microbiota and the gut microbiome in general. The role of our lab is to try and figure out how it interacts with our bodies and our brains—for better and for worse. With our experiments, we focus on altering the microbes to see if it causes real change in the host.

What attracted you to IU School of Medicine and Stark?
I was really excited about how much enthusiasm and collaboration exists here. Because I became engaged in neuroscience later in my career and my background is in biochemistry and microbiology, I enjoy working with and learning from the neuroscientists at Stark. There aren't a lot of people studying gut microbiota here, and everyone has been very interested in my research and eager to collaborate. The students here are exceptional, and it’s been easy to recruit great people, so that’s another benefit of being here.

What do you find most rewarding about your work?
When I became faculty and knew I’d be working less in the lab, I worried it wouldn’t be as much fun. But it turns out it's even more fun because now I have colleagues doing these experiments. When they have promising data, we experience the excitement together, and it’s rewarding to help them think about the next steps. That kind of mentorship and still feeling involved in the science have been really gratifying, interesting and fun.

Are there other things you’d like to explore and study?
People ask me all the time when they find out what I study: ‘What do you eat?’ ‘What’s your lifestyle?’ The truth is I don’t have a good answer because we don’t know enough yet to help every individual with precision. We don’t understand the complexity, and we’re not there yet to really know exactly what we should do in every context. Our goal is to get more specific answers about how we can manipulate this microbial community to take advantage of the beneficial ways it can help us be healthier and live better.