NIH award supports early career faculty member’s research and professional growth
Research into gestational diabetes has focused almost entirely on the mother — her metabolism, her risk factors, her outcomes. Kylie K. Harrall, PhD, thinks that’s only half the picture.
Harrall, Assistant Director of the Institute for Child Health Policy and a Research Assistant Professor and in UF’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, has started research on a K01 Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award — more than $750,000 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases — to test a different premise: that gestational diabetes risk emerges from the maternal-fetal genetic relationship, not from the mother’s biology in isolation.
Her research project, “Maternal and Fetal Genetic Contributions to Maternal Gestational Diabetes,” will be the first to characterize both sides of that relationship at once. If it works, the approach could extend well beyond diabetes by offering a template for studying other pregnancy complications, from preeclampsia to postpartum depression, as products of the maternal-placental-fetal unit rather than the mother alone.
“Historically, we have questioned how the mother’s behavior and health characteristics predict her risk for gestational diabetes. But this maternal-centric view leaves out half of the equation: the baby,” Harrall said.
Team genetics and gestation
The five-year award gives Harrall protected time and a mentoring team built to match the project’s interdisciplinary reach. Helen Jones, PhD, a placental biologist and Co-Director of UF’s Center for Research in Perinatal Outcomes, will serve as primary mentor. Elizabeth Shenkman, PhD, HOBI Chair and Director of the Institute for Child Health Policy, and Dana Dabelea, MD, PhD—Harrall’s doctoral mentor at the University of Colorado—distinguish a team that also includes UF’s Adetola Louis-Jacques, MD, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Ge Zhang, PhD, Professor in the Human Genetics Division at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“I’m deeply grateful to my mentoring team for their guidance throughout this process,” Harrall said. “Their contributions were instrumental to the award’s success.”
It’s a natural next step for Harrall, whose doctoral work under Dabelea linked GLP-1 receptor gene variants to childhood metabolic health. Harrall’s training bridges wet-lab molecular biology, biostatistics, and epidemiology — a combination that helps her see genetic research “from lab bench to public health impact.”
Harrall joined UF in 2024 after earning her doctorate in Epidemiology and master’s degree in Biostatistics from the University of Colorado-Denver.