Folami Y Ideraabdullah

Folami Ideraabdullah is an American geneticist and associate professor in the Department of Genetics and the Department of Nutrition at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ideraabdullah explores how maternal nutrition and environmental toxin exposure affect development through exploring epigenetic changes to DNA. She has found that maternal Vitamin D deficiencies can cause genome-wide changes in methylation patterns that persist for several generations and impact offspring health. Her international collaboration with the University of Witwatersrand represents the first time that metal levels in the placenta have been investigated in relation to birth outcomes in South Africa.

Early life and education Ideraabdullah wanted to be a scientist from a young age. It was in her high school biology class that she learned that DNA is the blueprint for biology, and this idea fascinated her. She majored in biology with a concentration in genetics and explored undergraduate research opportunities in the lab of Andrew Clark. Ideraabdullah graduated in 2001 with a Bachelors of Science.

Following her undergraduate degree, Ideraabdullah moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to conduct her graduate research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. She explored genetic diversity through a clear evolutionary framework. Her first work in the lab helped to elucidate the sequence diversity of 20 inbred mouse strains based on substitutions, insertions, and deletions. She found that the maternal and paternal components of the DDK syndrome are non-allelic based on characterizing the candidate intervals for the gene encoding the maternal and paternal factors. She mutated different regions within the ICR for H19/IGF2 and this caused a loss of repression of the imprinted gene, yet the methylation patterns at the imprinted gene's ICR and promoter region did not change. Using this tool, she explored how microdeletions in the imprinting control region for H19/IGF2 cause dysregulation of epigenetic marks and imprinted gene expression. She holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at the Gillings School of Global Public Health and she is an Affiliate Member of the Nutrition Research Institute in Kannapolis, North Carolina. As of 2016, Ideraabdullah became an Honorary Researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa within the MRC/Wits Developmental Pathways for Health Research Unit. Ideraabdullah is also a member of the Genetics Society of America. Ideraabdullah was interested in exploring how maternal intake of methyl donors affects development of offspring. Ideraabdullah explored how maternal vitamin D deficiency alters the methylation and imprinted loci. They found that developmental depletion of vitamin D led to loss of methylation epimutations in regions enriched for developmental and metabolic genes. 2019 Recipient of Vitamin D Workshop Young Investigator Award 2015 University Research Council Award - University of North Carolina 2014 IBM Junior Faculty Development Award - UNC PMCID: PMC5062906