Lola Holcomb

Education

  • Ursinus College, 2021, B.S. in Health and Exercise Physiology

Brief Biography

I grew up and attended college in the Philadelphia area. As a longtime endurance athlete, I found myself drawn to exercise physiology early in my undergraduate career at Ursinus College, and that quickly became my first research interest. However, the more science I did, the broader my research interests became. Come time for graduate school, I struggled to find a research niche wherein I felt truly passionate; I felt interested in so many different avenues of science that it seemed nearly impossible to pick just one to pursue during my doctoral studies. That indecisiveness led me to bioinformatics — a field in which I could use code and big data to study pretty much anything I could think of, and thus, satisfy many of my research interests. Currently, under the mentorship of Dr. Sue Ishaq, I am using bioinformatics as a lens for studying how differences in microbial ecology and nutritional biochemistry contribute to health and disease morbidity, health disparities, environmental issues, and social inequities. I was also recently awarded a One Health and the Environment NRT Fellowship here at UMaine, and which I will be using to advance my studies of microbes, health, and social equity.

Publications

  • Harvey, K. L., Holcomb, L. E., & Kolwicz, S. C., Jr (2019). Ketogenic Diets and Exercise Performance. Nutrients, 11(10), 2296. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11102296
  • Holcomb, Lola, “Ethical Considerations Regarding Paternalism in Medicine” (2020). Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics. 18. https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ethics_essay/18
  • Holcomb, L. E., O’Neill, C. C., DeWitt, E. A., & Kolwicz, S. C., Jr (2021). The Effects of Fasting or Ketogenic Diet on Endurance Exercise Performance and Metabolism in Female Mice. Metabolites, 11(6), 397. https://doi.org/10.3390/metabo11060397
  • Holcomb, L. E., Rowe, P., O’Neill, C. C., DeWitt, E. A., & Kolwicz, S. C., Jr (2022). Sex differences in endurance exercise capacity and skeletal muscle lipid metabolism in mice. Physiological reports, 10(3), e15174. https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.15174