What I Do - Esther Abiona
I am a postbac researcher here at the NIH Clinical Center. I’m working on the Clean Med Study, which is led by Dr. Karen Frank in the Department of Laboratory Medicine. She is amazing—one of the most thorough, intelligent people I’ve ever worked with.
Our study is a diet study looking at the relationship between your diet and your gut microbiome. It is the ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes that live your intestines. Many of the organisms are beneficial, but others aren’t. We’re gathering data to see how your gut microbiome changes when you eat a traditional Western diet vs. a Mediterranean diet free of ultra-processed foods or packaged snacks. I joined the study pretty early when we were enrolling our first participants.
People come in once a week or once a month for appointments. They get their blood drawn. They bring us stool and urine samples. We process all of that in the lab and send it out for analysis. Everybody in the study also sends us three food logs each week. I enter those food logs almost every day into our nutrition database, capturing the information for later analysis. That’s most of what I do. We have also published two review papers and have a journal club, where we talk about all sorts of gut microbiome research that’s going on. We do a lot.
The NIH postbac experience is 10 out of 10. I’ve learned so much working with different scientists, collaborating, hearing how a scientist thinks, a scientist talks, seeing how Dr. Frank communicates with patients. I’m applying to medical school this year. I’m interested in an MD-PhD program.
I volunteer with hospice care. A lot of my patients have Alzheimer’s or some type of dementia. I love talking to them. If there’s something I can do to prevent that—slow the progression down or help other people in the future—I would love to do that. Being here at NIH has been a great way to dip my feet in research before going back to school and learning how to do this for real on my own.
Esther Abiona graduated from the Delaware State University in 2021, where she majored in biology and conducted research on fruit flies in a neuroscience lab. She is in the third and final year of her postbac fellowship at the NIH Clinical Center.
-Interview by Sean Markey.