Jamey Young has spent more than a decade investigating metabolic disease mechanisms and metabolic disorders related to diabetes and obesity, employing metabolic and cell culture engineering to advance pioneering approaches to measure, understand, and control cellular metabolism.
Young was honored for his work at Vanderbilt’s 2025 Fall Faculty Assembly with a Chancellor’s Award for Research, which recognizes excellence in works of research, scholarship or creative expression published or presented in the past three calendar years.
Young, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, was nominated for his work detailed in a paper published in Metabolic Engineering, titled “INCA 2.0: A Tool for Integrated, Dynamic Modeling of NMR- and MS-based Isotopomer Measurements and Rigorous Metabolic Flux Analysis.”
Young’s research group uses stable isotope tracers, metabolomics measurements, and mathematical modeling to discover biological mechanisms that regulate metabolism. The ultimate goal of their work is to identify metabolic pathways that can be targeted for treatment of metabolic disorders or engineered for sustainable biomanufacturing of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In 2014 he released a computational tool called INCA for metabolic analysis that became widely used to model data and quantify the flow of atoms inside living cells.
INCA 2.0 is a significant advancement that integrates data from mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance within a single metabolic model to assess the rates, or ‘fluxes’, of physiological processes. It helps develop a deeper understanding of cellular function and its implications in health and diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and liver disease.
Young, also a professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, has authored over 100 articles and book chapters describing the application of metabolic flux analysis and mathematical modeling to investigate research questions of relevance to medicine and biomanufacturing. He also is a co-founder of Metalytics, Inc., which is a provider of metabolic flux analysis software and services to the biotechnology industry.
Contact: brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu