Research in focus: Tao Huan

Name:

Tao Huan

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department/Unit:

Chemistry

Are you Faculty or Staff?

Faculty

Location:

Vancouver

What year did you start working at UBC?

2018

Provide an overview of your research in 75 words or less:

Metabolomics is the study of the entire set of small molecules in biofluids, cells, and tissues. It is a powerful tool for biomarker discovery and understanding disease mechanisms. My research focuses on the development of analytical and bioinformatic tools for mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and its application in biological research. Among the various ongoing research projects, one important project is a metabolomics-guided social exposome study to identify critical environmental exposures for child health and development.

What first motivated you (or motivates you) to conduct your research?

Despite being the 5th most prosperous country in the world, Canada’s ranking of child well-being is alarmingly poor (25/41, UNICEF Canada). Thanks to the UBC Social Exposome Research Cluster, I got the chance to meet colleagues from other departments, and we decided to combine metabolomics (measures of environmental and endogenous chemicals) with measures of social determinants (e.g. income poverty, discrimination, low parental education, crime) to investigate their synergistic effects in determining child health and development.

What do you hope will change as a result of this research?

By incorporating methodologies from life science and social science, the goal is to provide comprehensive insight into how, when, and under what circumstances early life social and environmental factors affect child health and development. The research outcome will also be publicly released to guide new regulations, public information campaigns, and the development of preventive activities aimed at lowering these risk factors, which in turn will help prevent early-life impairment and have benefits for long-term health.

What have you learned during your research that has surprised you the most?

We are really surprised by the lack of interdisciplinary effort to understand the complicated social and biochemical effects on child health and development. Therefore, we formed a strong interdisciplinary team within the UBC Social Exposome Research Cluster. We hope that our complementary expertise in analytical chemistry, statistics, epidemiology, physiology, and public and population health can deliver a better understanding of the biological mechanisms by which social and environmental factors influence child health and development.

Describe any interesting research milestones you are approaching

Over thousands of metabolic features can be recorded in one metabolomics study. As such, controlling data quality becomes a critical big data challenge as it is impossible to manually check each individual feature. My lab has been developing analytical tools and bioinformatic programs to automate the process of data quality evaluation. Our multiple recent publications on Analytical Chemistry demonstrate the possibility of generating high-quality metabolomics data for its integrative study with social exposome measurements.