Biography

Dr. Delisha Stewart earned a B.S. degree at the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), both in Biochemistry. She has completed postdoctoral training at the University of Delaware, studying prostate cancer ontology and therapeutic development, back at UAB investigating Notch signaling in osteosarcoma. Following a hiatus from academic research, she received a Re-Entry grant from the NIH-NCI to foster diversity in the Biomedical sciences and completed two additional postdoctoral fellowships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) using genomics to study breast cancer microenvironment–immune crosstalk related to inflammation and clinical subtype aggressiveness. Her training ended at RTI International, incorporating the importance of metabolism using metabolomics to interrogate cancer progression and treatment response outcomes. In 2017, she joined the faculty at UNC-CH in the Department of Nutrition as an Assistant Professor, working at the UNC-Nutrition Research Institute in Kannapolis, NC. Her research focuses on the impact of different nutritional states on genetic-, environmental- (i.e., dietary pattern & obesity) and inflammation-driving metabolic programs that fuel cancer progression, contribute to poor chemotherapeutic treatment responses and result in disparate health outcomes in women with gynecological cancers (breast and endometrial). Having joined the faculty at Howard University (November 2024), in the College of Medicine's Department of Microbiology, she will now expand her inter-disciplinary approach to research by adding the influence of the microbiome as a contributing factor to diminished treatment response, and try to use both nutritional intervention and microbial perturbation to improve outcomes from women diagnosed primarily with aggressive forms of breast cancer.