AdventHealth Researcher Selected as NIH Rising Star for His Work on How Exercise Transforms Human Adipose Tissue

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Disease Prevention has selected AdventHealth Translational Research Institute (TRI) Postdoctoral Research Scientist Cheehoon Ahn, PhD, as one of four invited speakers for their inaugural Rising Stars in Physical Activity Research Symposium, taking place on August 11, 2026.

Titled The Role of Physical Activity in Chronic Disease Prevention and Management Across the Life Course, the symposium will bring together researchers, practitioners and policymakers from across the country to explore innovative and equitable approaches to increasing physical activity and reducing chronic disease risk. Organizers hope to spotlight emerging ideas, unanswered questions, research gaps and future directions in the field.

Dr. Ahn specializes in translational research focused on exercise physiology, adipose (fat) tissue biology, obesity and aging. He works with AdventHealth TRI Senior Investigator Lauren M. Sparks, PhD and has primarily been analyzing data from the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC), a large-scale, NIH-funded research program initiative designed to uncover how physical activity changes the body at the molecular level. AdventHealth TRI serves as one of 10 clinical sites for MoTrPAC under Scientific Director and Principal Investigator Bret Goodpaster, PhD.

“Dr. Ahn’s creativity is what sets him apart and why he was selected as a Rising Star,” shares Dr. Sparks. “Large-scale studies like MoTrPAC generate an extraordinary amount of data, and in just two years with our team, he has combined his expertise in biology and exercise physiology to uncover meaningful patterns and transform complex datasets into compelling scientific insights. That ability to identify important stories within the data is something truly special that not everyone can do. It's one of the many reasons Dr. Ahn is so deserving of this recognition and opportunity.”

A Different Lens on Metabolic Health

For decades, exercise physiology research has centered largely on skeletal muscle, the tissue responsible for movement and one of the body's primary metabolic regulators. However, during his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, Dr. Ahn became intrigued by a different question: What if important health benefits of exercise are occurring within adipose tissue itself?

“When scientists study exercise, most will focus on muscle because it is the primary tissue that drives movement,” explains Dr. Ahn. “However, I always wondered if everyone is focused on losing fat, why are we not paying more attention to the impact of exercise on the adipose tissue itself? During my PhD, I began exploring how the molecular characteristics of human adipose tissue relate to cardiometabolic health and how exercise can modify those characteristics.”

As he was completing his graduate work, Dr. Ahn reached out to Dr. Sparks. He was familiar with her work in adipose tissue and exercise, and the two quickly connected over their shared research interest. She invited him to join AdventHealth TRI in 2024. Since then, Dr. Ahn has continued advancing his line of investigation, helping to build a deeper understanding of how exercise influences metabolic health beyond changes on a scale.

Translating Big Data into Clinical Insight

That work has expanded significantly through Dr. Ahn’s involvement with MoTrPAC. As one of the consortium’s participating sites, AdventHealth researchers have spent years collecting extensive biological data from study participants before and after exercise sessions, including blood and tissue samples. The goal is to identify the molecular signals triggered by exercise and ultimately support a more precise, personalized approach to exercise prescription.

Dr. Ahn has played a key role in analyzing this complex dataset, helping transform vast amounts of biological information into clinically meaningful discoveries.

“We know exercise is good, but we still don’t know why it’s good,” he says. “We believe that the MoTrPAC findings could not only inform people that exercise is beneficial but use exercise as a tool to explore the molecules that boost our health. Then, what we learn about those small molecules and signaling pathways could be applied beyond exercise to inform medical practices and pharmaceutical development. We’re excited about the potential positive impacts.”

Already, Dr. Ahn has leveraged MoTrPAC data to further investigate how exercise affects adipose tissue and is leading a scientific publication examining molecular transducers across multiple tissues in response to acute exercise.

“He is analytically integrating the clinical data with the molecular data, and that is really a new frontier,” says Dr. Sparks. “It is the direction the field has been moving, but I believe Dr. Ahn has been ahead of the curve from the beginning. His work is helping us better understand the biological mechanisms behind exercise and bringing us closer to more precise, personalized approaches to improving health.”

Reframing the Role of Adipose Tissue

One of the most compelling findings emerging from Dr. Ahn’s research is that exercise produces meaningful biological improvements within adipose tissue even when body weight remains unchanged.

“If we look at a group of people who have been exercising for a long time, their fat tissue is quite different from people who have never exercised, even if the two groups have a similar amount of fat,” he explains. “In those who exercise, the fat tissue is highly vascularized with more capillaries. There are also a lot of different transcriptional programs being altered, so more substrate metabolism is upregulated in their fat tissue.”

Beyond improving blood vessel formation and metabolic activity, exercise appears to reshape the structural environment surrounding fat cells. Dr. Ahn’s research has shown that exercise can alter collagen fibers within the extracellular matrix, a complex three-dimensional network of proteins, carbohydrates and fluids that provides support to adipose tissue.

“In people with obesity or type 2 diabetes, their fat tissue is often characterized by too many collagen fibers in the extracellular matrix, making the whole tissue quite stiff,” he explains. “However, we found that if people in these groups exercise for even a few months, the number of stiff collagens could be reduced, regardless of whether they lose weight. So, we think that all these different structural and tissue-specific changes could be one of the pathways that might lead to improved health in the long term, even without weight loss.”

These findings are helping reshape how researchers think about exercise interventions and the biological pathways through which physical activity promotes health.

Designing Better Human Studies

As Dr. Ahn’s understanding of adipose tissue biology has evolved, so too has his perspective on how exercise studies should be designed. Because exercise can produce significant tissue-level changes independent of weight loss, he believes future studies must carefully separate the direct effects of exercise from those caused by caloric deficits or changes in body composition.

“If we are designing a longitudinal study, we need to make sure the people do not lose weight, and if a study is cross-sectional, we want to match the body composition or use some sort of statistical model to account for that,” he says.

His research has also highlighted another important but often overlooked variable: circadian rhythm.

“While every cell in our body has a circadian rhythm, we have found that fat tissue is most affected by that circadian rhythm” he explains. “As a result, when we design future studies on acute exercise, we must include control groups. This is something that has historically been lacking in the design of these types of research efforts.”

Together, these insights are informing a more rigorous framework for studying exercise biology and ensuring future findings are both reproducible and clinically relevant.

Expanding the Science of Healthy Aging

More recently, Dr. Ahn has expanded his research efforts of adipose tissue to investigate the impacts of aging.

In addition to MoTrPAC, the AdventHealth TRI is participating in the Study of Muscle, Mobility and Aging (SOMMA), a longitudinal cohort study funded by the National Institute on Aging that seeks to identify biological factors that predict onset of disability or dementia in older adults.

Although SOMMA primarily focuses on skeletal muscle, the study also collected adipose tissue samples, creating a unique opportunity for Dr. Ahn to investigate how aging influences fat tissue biology.

“It’s quite interesting because as people age, we always worry about them gaining weight, but they also start to lose body fat at some point,” he shares. “But we do not know much about that biology and how these changes in body composition impact metabolic health. Digging deeper into the SOMMA tissue data, we hope to learn more.”

This work broadens Dr. Ahn’s research by examining how adipose tissue changes throughout life, with the goal of uncovering new insights into healthy aging.

Shaping the Future of Exercise Medicine

While the NIH Rising Stars Symposium invitation recognizes Dr. Ahn’s scientific accomplishments to date, it also reflects the growing influence of his work on the direction of exercise research. This opportunity will also allow him to engage with other emerging leaders in the field and contribute to discussions that could shape future research priorities and clinical applications.

Dr. Ahn’s ultimate goal extends beyond understanding how exercise works. He hopes to help translate those discoveries into more precise, individualized strategies for disease prevention and health optimization.

“Exercise is about so much more than losing weight,” he says. “It changes the biology of tissues in ways that may ultimately transform how clinicians prevent and treat conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and age-related cognitive decline. In the longer term, one of the primary goals of our research is to increase the precision and personalization of recommended exercise so that eventually providers may be able to prescribe different doses and structure specific programs to meet an individual patient’s unique diagnosis and biology.”

Dr. Sparks is excited about the impact Dr. Ahn is already making and the promise of what lies ahead.

“At the end of the day, generating data is only the beginning,” she says. “What truly matters is having someone who can interpret, analyze and make sense of it to uncover meaningful insights. That’s where Dr. Ahn is truly a rising star. He combines analytical prowess with a deep understanding of biology and a genuine passion for adipose tissue research. He is exactly the kind of scientist who will help move our field forward, and I can’t wait to see where his work takes us.”