Ammara Aqeel spent five years in what she calls "the poop lab at Duke." '

Aqueel emerged with a PhD, a co-authored method for reading someone's diet from their poo, and a patent filing for a tool that could help dietitians track what children eat without relying on food diaries.

Aqeel completed her PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology in May 2025, working in the laboratory of Lawrence David, associate professor and interim director of the Duke Microbiome Center. The David Lab adapted a DNA metabarcoding technique from ecology, where researchers sequenced residual DNA from herbivore stools to infer diet, and applied it to humans. The method sequences DNA from plant chloroplasts and animal mitochondria in stool samples, comparing them against a database of more than 400 species commonly found in the human diet.

Aqeel's research applied that tool to children's health. A 2023 paper she co-authored in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 1,029 fecal samples from 324 participants and found that plant DNA diversity in stool correlated with dietary quality, age, and household income. She led a multinational project spanning Durham, rural Pakistan, and Honduras, analyzing more than 1,500 samples in collaboration with Yale, Cornell, and Aga Khan University.

That breadth of research drove her toward commercialization. "What I saw across the board was that there is so much amazing research done in a lab, but it doesn't always make it to the bedside or the market," Aqeel told Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

She won first place and $6,500 in the Christensen Family Center for Innovation's 10-week translation accelerator in December 2023, a program tied to the $26 million NSF-funded Precision Microbiome Engineering Research Center. After interviewing roughly a dozen stakeholders during the accelerator, she shifted the product's target audience from individual patients to dietitians working with children too sick to complete food diaries. She then filed an invention disclosure with Duke's Office of Translation and Commercialization.

Her most recent published work includes enhanced dietary monitoring using fecal genomics for childhood malnutrition interventions as published in the Royal Society of Chemistry on March 18, 2026. Aqeel's pilot randomized controlled trial on grocery interventions and DNA-based diet assessment in pediatric obesity was published in the journal Obesity on January 22, 2025, and a preprint extending the method to childhood malnutrition that appeared on medRxiv on June 4, 2025.

Aqeel also co-founded Duke's Medical Science Liaison Club and served as a Senior Technology Commercialization Fellow at Duke's Office for Translation and Commercialization. In April 2025, she was named to the Duke Entrepreneurial Leaders Network's 2025 cohort.

Whether the diet-tracking tool reaches the dietitians Aqeel identified as its best users remains an open question. She has since left Duke for a clinical trial management role at Medpace, but the David Lab continues experiments to build the clinical case for the platform she helped design.