Linnea Freeman Wins Three-Year, $416,000 NIH Research Grant

Before coming to Furman University in 2015, Linnea Freeman, associate professor of biology and neuroscience, applied behavioral experiments in rats to neuroscience questions as a postdoc at the Medical University of South Carolina. The specific type of research, behavioral economics, allowed Freeman and her colleagues to explore how much value a reward, such as a high-calorie food, holds for individual rats.

Now, with a $416,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Freeman will bring behavioral economics to her lab at Furman. She and the undergraduate researchers on her team will explore the effects of the microbes that reside in the gastrointestinal tract, known as the microbiome, on rats’ consumption of palatable food.

In 2019, Freeman’s group showed that diets high in fat can alter the composition of the microbes in a rat’s gut. She has also incorporated an understanding of sex differences into her microbiome research. It’s possible, she explained, that sex differences in the fecal microbiome contribute to the higher value female rats place on yummy foods, a finding she uncovered during her postdoc with behavioral economics.

“I’m excited to revisit the types of experiments that I did in my postdoc, and to merge my training with what we’ve been doing recently in the lab and look at it through a different lens,” Freeman said.

In addition to financing the purchase of the equipment and supplies needed for behavioral economics experiments, her new grant will create stipends for at least two students every summer for the next three summers and money to help those undergraduates travel to a conference each year to share their work. That support is “a bonus” because Furman already funds student researchers each year through Furman Summer Research Fellowships, Freeman said. “The student involvement is going to be awesome, and I’m glad that is part of the mechanism of the grant that I can incorporate students’ training into the process.”