Thi Yen Ly Huynh, Ph.D.Thi Yen Ly Huynh, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Ramanadham Lab at the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center (UCDC), was selected as a finalist for the Outstanding Young Scientist Awards to be presented at the International Meeting on Lipid Mediators in Health and Disease.

Huynh is from Vietnam and earned her doctorate in Biomedical Research and completed her Biostatistics Doctoral Fellowship under the Marie-Cuire-Horizon 2020 CONFUND (ImPRESS) project in Poland from 2018 to 2022.

She is currently a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Sasanka Ramanadham, Ph.D., professor in the UAB Department of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology (CDIB) and senior scientist in the UCDC.

In the UCDC, Huynh is leveraging her strong background in cellular metabolism and diabetes to explore the molecular mechanism of how lipid signaling leads to Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), a disease associated with autoimmune-mediated inflammation and death of insulin-producing beta cells.

“Our current research project is focused on understanding the regulatory role of select lipid signaling on the specific inflammation pathways leading to beta cell death and T1D development,” Huynh said.

The International Meeting on Lipid Mediators in Health and Disease is jointly sponsored by the Eicosanoid Research Foundation (ERF) and Winter Eicosanoid Conference (WEC). The ERF-WEC joint conference organizing committee will award Outstanding Young Scientist Awards to one graduate student and one postdoctoral fellow for the best poster presented during the conference. Huynh is among five finalists selected in each category.

Huynh also received a travel award to attend the meeting originally scheduled to be held in October 2025 at the Natcher Conference Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The meeting has been postponed due to the federal government shutdown.