Farm to lab

You can learn a lot growing up in Iowa surrounded by cornfields.

Austin Mills learned that you can, in fact, use fishing line to suture a wound, something he discovered when one of the family’s turkeys, Rafiki, suffered a punctured chest after falling on a fence post.

As Rafiki’s guts lay exposed, a calm Mills performed emergency surgery, sewing the wound up with fishing line and coating it with antibiotics.

“That turkey lived for five years after that and continued to lay eggs,” he said, smiling.

That successful emergency surgery helped spark Mills’ passion for science that set him on a winding path to the University of Georgia. 

After receiving undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry at Iowa’s Coe College, Mills worked in industry as a research associate and scientist. 

His natural curiosity eventually led him back to academia, where he is now a Ph.D. student studying weight loss drugs in Emily Noble’s Nutritional Neuroscience Lab in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

“It seemed like this combination of all these fields that I love so much – biology and nutrition and neuroscience,” Mills said. “I remember thinking ‘This is definitely what I want to do.’ I came to visit and was just fascinated with the research she was doing.”

Seeking answers

Mills’ research focuses on the long-term effects of weight loss drugs on adolescents. Well-studied in adults, less is known about the drugs’ effects on people under 18.

Obesity affects approximately one in five U.S. adolescents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

After the Food and Drug Administration expanded approval of two obesity medications to include adolescents in 2020, the proportion of U.S. adolescents who were prescribed the drugs increased by 300 percent in 2023.

“Our goal is to understand if there are any developmental effects of giving these drugs, which significantly reduce food intake and reduce body weight, during the adolescent period when individuals are supposed to be growing and developing,” Mills said.

Most of Mills’ research is conducted on the sixth floor of the Psychology building, where a small room houses 48 Sprague Dawley rats. Seven days a week, Mills feeds the rats, weighs and injects them and calculates their food and liquid intake. 

Every two weeks, he measures the rats’ body composition for changes in fat mass, lean body mass and bone density. He also conducts several behavior tests throughout the experiment to assess cognitive function in the adolescent rats.

The rats are divided into four groups: a control group consumes a standard “rat chow” diet; a second group consumes a typical American, westernized diet high in fat and sugar to stimulate obesity.

The third group eats the same diet as the second group but also receives daily injections of semaglutide, a common synthetic GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide) receptor agonist that mimics the hormone that stimulates insulin release, slows gastric emptying and acts in the brain to reduce hunger. 

A fourth group eats the high-fat diet but its caloric intake matches the semaglutide group.

“This fourth group is extremely important for our experiments because it helps us understand what about semaglutide is resulting in weight loss or other potentially beneficial effects,” Mills said. “If it’s just about caloric restriction, the semaglutide and calorically restricted groups should share the same outcomes.”

Lifelong skills

Mills has presented preliminary research findings across the country. He said he finds the research fascinating, feeding his curiosity about neuroscience and nutrition.

“One of the things that has changed a lot for me from, say, five years ago, is I’ve learned that research is a bunch of pivoting as you hit roadblocks,” he said. “A lot of times you hear things in the news or on social media where people are hammering home one point, but the world is never black and white. Nothing in science is ever settled because we should always be questioning and thinking.”

Just as important to his professional development has been Noble’s mentorship. Mills had no real research background coming into the doctoral program, but Noble’s focus on assembling a lab of like-minded, supportive students made the transition easier. 

“She does a ton of things that I appreciate, but one of the best things she does for all of her grad students is that she wants all of us to love what we’re doing and what we’re studying,” he said. “She’s created a teamwork environment and a community where everyone is willing to pitch in.”

Mills said he hasn’t settled on his path post-graduation. He enjoys the hands-on aspect of working in the lab but also the writing and analysis – skills that have unlocked a variety of opportunities.

“I’m honestly not sure what I want to do, be it industry or research or however that looks,” he said, “but I think there are a lot of skills and techniques and just general critical thinking types of abilities that I’ve learned through the process that will go with me wherever I go.”