Barbara Nikolajczyk is a Professor of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences at The University of Kentucky. She received her B.S. from The Ohio State University and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by post-doctoral work at Tufts and Brandeis Universities. Her first independent position was at Boston University School of Medicine and she moved from there to the University of Kentucky in 2017. Her research focuses on identifying the role immune cells play in human obesity and aging, and associated comorbidities including type 2 diabetes and periodontal disease. Dr. Nikolajczyk is a member of The American Association of Immunologists, The American Diabetes Association, and the American Aging Association. She has been funded as Principal Investigator on grants from the NIH (NIA, NIDDK, NIDCR, and NIAID), the American Diabetes Association, the American Lung Association and the Arthritis Foundation. She is currently serving as Associate Director for Translational Research in Diabetes at the Barnstable Brown Diabetes Center, and Director of the Alliance for Diabetes and Obesity Research, both based at The University of Kentucky. She has published work on reproductive biology, molecular immunology, and numerous aspects of pathogenic inflammation in journals including Cell Metabolism, Nature, Diabetes and PNAS. She has over 100 invited presentations nationally and internationally.