Evelyn Bates remembers the early years she embarked on her PhD and the imposter syndrome that loomed. Just a year and a half into her training, she submitted a grant proposal that presented challenges — early feedback and lots of revisions. At a conference, with an impending oral presentation on her work, she juggled those revisions and a tight resubmission deadline. She poured every ounce of determination into her application.
Months later, the good results came in.
“Seeing that score was life-changing,” Bates said. “It wasn’t just validation of my research — it was proof that my work mattered.”
For Bates, it was her biggest scientific achievement yet. That grant she worked toward was the prestigious Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
For this project, she is studying rosiglitazone, a drug that improves insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes. Despite its efficacy, the drug has a dangerous complication: it causes congestive heart failure in a subset of patients for reasons no one fully understood. Bates will work to uncover how co-regulator proteins can curb the drug’s effects on adipose and heart tissues.
She uses a highly advanced instrument, the PamGene PamStation, to study these proteins. There are only five universities in the U.S. with access to this instrument, including the University of Kentucky in the lab of Terry Hinds, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and nutritional sciences.
The hope is to pave the way for safer, more personalized treatments. Bates said coregulator biology has been generally understudied in recent years due to technological difficulties in studying the complex proteins. She hopes to implement her data analysis expertise into a machine-learning algorithm that can predict transcriptional responses based on coregulator interactions.
The grant will help develop understanding of how different tissues respond to treatment in the context of obesity.
Bates also recently received a graduate student travel award to attend the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology International Meeting (Discover BMB 2025) in April 2025 in Chicago. “This award is based on the work I am conducting on this grant and developing specialized therapies that target coregulator interactions,” she said.
From a young scientist uncertain of her potential to a NIH-funded researcher poised to make a tangible impact, Bates realized she had come a long way.
Her plan after graduating is to use these tools in plant-derived therapeutics, as she is passionate about finding sustainable solutions to metabolic disease derived from natural products. In the meantime, she hopes this grant puts her in the position to help others achieve their funding goals.
“It is important to me to hopefully inspire younger scientists,” she said, “and give them the confidence that they can do it, too.”
Learn more about Evelyn’s passion for research in our “Because We Care” docuseries. https://medicine.uky.edu/because-we-care
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31HL175979. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
