Dr. Soliman is a tenured professor of nutrition in the Department of Environmental, Occupational, and Geospatial Health Sciences and the Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the City University of New York, Graduate School of Public Health, and Health Policy (CUNY-SPH). She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Structural Biology Initiative of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC). Previously, she developed and served as the Doctoral Program Director for the Environmental and Planetary Health (EPHS) PhD Program at CUNY-SPH. She has held faculty positions at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Michigan Medical School and is a recipient of grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, as well as institutional grants to support her research program.
Her role in NEXUS is a Lead in the Administration/Stakeholder Engagement hub to expand the reach of NEXUS and the dynamic engagement of CUNY graduate students, researchers, community, and professional network, and to support the scientific and intellectual vision of the NEXUS team.
Dr. Soliman’s research on nutritional exposomics incorporates wet laboratory methods of nutrient-sensing pathways, such as the mechanistic Target of the Rapamycin (mTOR) complexes (mTORC1/mTORC2) metabolic networks, and computational data science to investigate the role of the nutritional exposome in metabolic diseases and cancer. By integrating cell culture mechanistic studies, high-resolution mass spectrometry, system biology, predictive models, and data science, the team investigates how nutrients and beverage exposures, dietary patterns, and environmental factors alter the signaling and metabolic pathways, as a framework for developing nutritional interventions for chronic diseases.
Her current research focuses on the Cardiovascular Kidney Metabolic (CKM) syndrome, engaging the NIH-All of Us data partnership to examine the factors contributing to the progression stages of CKM to develop predictive models and improve health outcomes. As a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RD), Dr. Soliman has a keen perspective on community and public health nutrition. Thus, her translational research investigates the non-genetic drivers of human diseases to develop actionable nutrition-based interventions that promote disease prevention and reduce the chronic disease burden.
She published over fifty-five peer-reviewed papers in nutrition research and book chapters on nutrition, cholesterol metabolism, fiber intake, and causes of obesity. She is an associate editor of the journal Frontiers on Public Health and Nutrition, a guest editor for the journal Nutrients, Special Issues on Metabolomics and Nutrition, and Nutrigenomics and Exposomics: Precision Nutrition in Metabolic Diseases, and serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals. She is also a member of the American Public Health Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Society for Nutrition, and the American Association for Cancer Research, among others.
Fun Fact: I grew up in Zambia, and I was chased by a monkey who was after the same banana that I had earned by climbing the banana tree in my garden.
Featured Work:
- Guest Editor, Nutrients (Special Issue) “Metabolomics and Nutrition: From Bench to Bedside”
- “What is Public Health Nutrition?” (Youtube video)
- “Metabolic Syndrome” (Youtube video)