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Jiffin Paulose
Post-Doctoral Scholar

Jiffin received his B.Sc. in Biology from Texas A&M University.  It was during his undergraduate studies where he received his first taste of empirical exploration.  Under the tutelage of Dr. Vincent Cassone, Jiffin engaged in what was to him ground-breaking and exciting research on circadian rhythms.  His experiments ultimately led him nowhere scientifically speaking, but it was a lot of fun.

After graduating, Jiffin obtained gainful employment on the campus of A&M as a lab manager in the Department of Entomology under the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.  Here, Jiffin made full use of his undergraduate training; not in science, but his minor in business administration.  After a year of masterful budgeting and accounting, motivated supervising of equally uninspired undergraduate employees, and horrifying maintenance of various mosquito colonies, Jiffin returned to the laboratory of Dr. Cassone to pursue a Ph.D. in Biology.

Graduate school was a refreshing reprieve for Jiffin.  He soon learned just how practical his undergraduate education in life sciences was:  not very.  It was here, in the graduate program, where Jiffin learned how to think.

It was a hot and humid Summer of 2008 when Jiffin heard the call from the University of Kentucky.    The most interesting aspect of the call was that it wasn't even his phone that rang.  The offer to move was given to his mentor, Dr. Cassone; and with that offer, a terrible choice.  One door led away from Texas, the only academic home he had ever known.  It was safe, it was comfortable, it was home.  This foreign land of Kentucky was a place he thought he would only know in his dreams.  The birthplace of bourbon, bluegrass music, and Johnny Depp was scary, yet intriguing; distant, yet manageable by car; foreign, yet still within the borders of the continental U.S.  The other door led to the same lab and a similar life, but without the physical presence of his mentor.  That seemed boring, so Jiffin took the first option.

Jiffin successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and continues as a Post-doctoral researcher in the Biology Department.  His current work investigates how circadian rhythms - the biological clock that synchronizes biological processes to the daily environment - influence the gastrointestinal tract and its resident microbiome.  

Although Jiffin is ever closer to ending his tenure at the University of Kentucky, he is still unsure of where to go from here.  As has always been the case, he hopes that Science will lead the way.

 

Contact Information
j.paulose@uky.edu
302B T. H. Morgan Bldg
(859) 257-2289
Education
Ph.D. Biology - Texas A&M University
B.Sc. Biology - Texas A&M University
Research Interests
  • Gut Microbiome
  • Mammalian circadian rhythms and metabolism
  • Gastroenterology
  • human-microbe relationships
  • Avian Biology
Affiliations
  • Biology
  • Biology Education