14 Aug Meet Monell: Amber Alhadeff on How the Gut and Brain Influence What We Eat and When

At the Monell Chemical Senses Center, where scientists explore how taste and smell shape human behavior, Dr. Amber Alhadeff is asking a deceptively simple question: why do we eat the way we do?

Dr. Amber Alhadeff

Alhadeff is a recipient of the 2021 NIH Directors New Innovator Award,  the 2021 Eppendorf & Science Prize in Neurobiology, and most recently the 2026 Alan N. Epstein Research Award from the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. She is also a Pew Biomedical Scholar and a New York Stem Cell Foundation – Robertson Neuroscience Investigator. As a principal investigator at Monell, Alhadeff leads a neuroscience lab focused on gut-brain communication: the complex dialogue between our digestive system and our brain that ultimately drives feeding behavior.

While the lab’s long-term goal is to help develop treatments for conditions like type 2 diabetes and obesity, its work begins with basic science of understanding the neural circuits and mechanisms that regulate feeding and shape everyday food choices. As Alhadeff explains, this foundational work is essential: “We don’t have a good understanding of very basic physiological functions of the body: we eat every day, multiple times a day, but we still don’t fully understand how the brain and body control this behavior.”

With the rise of new obesity medications in recent years, Alhadeff describes that it is a “a really exciting time to be studying the neural control of feeding behavior.” One major focus of her lab is understanding how GLP-1 receptors in the brain reduce food intake and body weight. Identifying where these drugs act and which neural pathways they engage is critical to improving their effectiveness.

One of the lab’s recent breakthroughs discovered that there are separate neural circuits in the brain that mediate different effects of GLP-1 drugs. This means that in the future, researchers may be able to target GLP-1 drugs towards the neural circuits that make people feel full and away from the neural circuits that cause nausea, so that drugs are more tolerable and can effectively promote weight loss without making people sick.

In addition to leading her research program, Alhadeff is deeply committed to mentorship. She works with trainees at all levels including high school, undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and post-doctoral students. “One of my favorite parts of the job is mentoring students and postdocs in my lab–and I find this mentorship to be one of the most rewarding parts of my career,” she explains.

Many of these trainees participate through the Monell Science Apprenticeship Program (MSAP), which Alhadeff describes as “one of the most important things that the Monell Center does for the community.” For more than 40 years, MSAP has provided high school and undergraduate students interested in pursuing careers in biomedical science or medicine with hands-on research experience in Monell labs.

“I’m always blown away by the kinds of research projects high school and college students are doing right here at Monell,” Alhadeff explains.

Looking ahead, Alhadeff hopes to translate her lab’s basic discoveries into real-world applications that can help individuals living with metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Investing in Monell means supporting both foundational and translational science that deepens our understanding of sensory biology and helps drive improvements in human health.