Associate Professor
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Dr. Sarah Borengasser is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics – Endocrinology and Diabetes and faculty at the TSET Health Promotion Research Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She also serves as Vice Chair for Research and Training at the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center. Her primary research interests involve using multi-omics approaches (epigenetics, metabolomics, genetics, gut microbiome, and proteomics) to identify molecular biomarkers and biologically relevant pathways for environmental exposures in adult and pediatric populations, with specific expertise in epigenetics. Most recently, she is highly enthusiastic about using epigenetic clocks/epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) as biomarkers to assess the role of detrimental (obesity, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, smoking) and beneficial (weight loss, exercise, high quality diet, smoking cessation) environmental exposures on biological (body) age and intervention responsiveness.
Dr. Borengasser has been an exercise, nutrition, and obesity researcher for 18+ years across the translational research spectrum. She has been funded by NIH at every career level (T32 predoctoral student, T32 postdoctoral fellow, K01 faculty, R01 faculty). She completed a 3-year K01 DK109077 that focused on clinical epigenetics as part of a randomized controlled nutrition trial in mother-infant dyads. She has also served as PI on an American Heart Association Innovative Project Award and an Olink Proteomics Pilot Award comparing changes in DNA methylation, gut microbiota, metabolomics, and proteomics in response to a behavioral weight loss intervention in adults with overweight and obesity.
Dr. Borengasser is passionate about mentoring the next generation of nutrition, obesity, and exercise scientists. She has developed a career development curriculum focused on enhancing communication skills to effectively present research findings to scientific and lay audiences using TED-talk style approaches. On a personal note, Dr. Borengasser has been an avid runner for 30+ years and loves to eat/cook, watch her kids compete in soccer and cross country, and read.