Youjin Kim
"Healthy diet is associated with epigenetic age deceleration"
Genome-wide DNA methylation profiling has been used to develop algorithms for epigenetic age prediction. These algorithms are associated with the risks of age-related disease and mortality. Food and nutrients are reported to modify DNA methylation patterns, however, the relation between overall diet and epigenetic age is not fully investigated. This seminar will present the association between healthy diet and epigenetic aging acceleration in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort.
Bio: Youjin Kim is postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Jiantao Ma. Previously, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow and research fellow at Ewha Womans University in South Korea and carried out collaborative research with Dutch research organization TNO. Her ultimate research goal is to develop precision nutrition strategy — i.e. estimation of individuals’ health status, prediction of response to diet or specific foods, and development of personalized nutrition plan. She had focused on the model development for quantifying an individual’s health status and biomarker identification for estimating the response to nutritional interventions. Her current research interest includes integrative omics analysis examining the association of diet and its components with age- and diet-related chronic diseases.
Victoria Miller
"Defining a healthy diet: global and national trends in dietary pattern adherence"
While individual dietary factors are important, overall dietary patterns are more strongly associated with health outcomes than single foods or nutrients. Among promising dietary patterns, the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), and the Mediterranean Diet (MED) are the most validated dietary patterns for cardiometabolic disease. Yet, little is known about the distributions of these dietary patterns globally. In this presentation I will characterize dietary patterns based on individual-level intake data in adults and children from 185 countries.
Bio: Dr. Victoria Miller received her PhD in Population and Public Health at McMaster University and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy under the mentorship of Drs. Dariush Mozaffarian and Patrick Webb. She is a recipient of the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr. Miller currently collaborates on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded Global Dietary Database to evaluate dietary intake in adults and children and its associations with all forms of malnutrition. Her main research interests include global dietary assessment, maternal and child diet quality, modeling the relationship between dietary factors and disease risk, and food policy analysis.
Meng Wang
"Animal source foods, trimethylamine N-oxide-related metabolites, and incident atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease among older adults"
This talk will present a study examining associations between intakes of animal source foods and incident atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in an older US population, and the extent to which gut-microbiota generated metabolites of animal source foods can explain these associations. Implications for understanding the biological mechanisms linking animal source foods, especially red meat, to cardiovascular risk will be discussed.
Bio: Meng Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University under the supervision of Dr. Mozaffarian. Her current research focuses on understanding the role of gut microbiota-generated metabolites in cardiovascular and metabolic health. Her research interests also include cardiovascular disease risk prediction and modeling associations between dietary factors and chronic diseases. She received her PhD in Epidemiology at University of Rochester.
Sonia Zaharia
"Using longitudinal panel data to assess nutritional resilience and the relationship between animal-sourced foods consumption and child growth"
Sonia will talk about her recent work with longitudinal panel data from Nepal, Uganda, and Bangladesh. She will present a new method to measure nutritional resilience. She will also show her findings on the relationship between animal-sourced foods consumption over time and growth of young children.
Bio: Sonia is a postdoctoral fellow at the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition. She is working with Professors Shibani Ghosh, William Masters, and Patrick Webb. Her research lies at the intersection of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. In her current work, she focuses on resilience measurement, maternal and child nutrition, and agriculture-nutrition linkages. She has a MSc in Sustainable Food Systems from Wageningen University, a PhD in Finance from Goethe University in Frankfurt, and previously worked as an economist at the European Central Bank.