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Professor
Rush University Medical Center
Chicago, Illinois, United States
I am a Professor in the Departments of Clinical Nutrition and Preventive Medicine at Rush and have a breadth of nutrition research that supports many researchers at our institution. I have advised more than 175 graduate students in our Clinical Nutrition masters thesis program as well as research efforts of medical fellows and doctoral nurses here at Rush and at University of North Carolina. As current site P/I of the U.S Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (US POINTER) trial for Chicagoland, I oversee, plan, promote and facilitate recruitment efforts, the multi-domain intervention, and retention of older adults from diverse communities in Chicago; we have assembled an excellent team of professionals who work well together and with our partners at a clinic in another large health system, Advocate Aurora Health. While I advise on many aspects of this trial with guidance from the Coordinating Center at Wake Forest under the leadership of Dr. Laura Baker, I am especially “tuned into” the dietary intervention/adherence component. My previous role as Associate Dean for Research in our College also has aided efforts to navigate the ever- changing policies and procedures in university research administration. I am co-P/I of the Nutrition effects on brain OUtcomes and Recovery In Stroke after Hospitalization (NOURISH) Study-- a diet intervention trial for recent survivors of ischemic stroke; accrual is from three major Chicago hospitals in the stroke network that serve a very diverse community. Because of this, the trial outcomes and intervention professionals have been trained and selected for their culturally sensitivity. I learned much as a co-investigator for the Chicago Westside surveillance efforts with Dr. Beth Lynch and her team which church leaders/members partnered with us to develop programs on making better diet and lifestyle choices. Based on those efforts Dr. Lynch, myself and others currently have a R01-funded trial in the efficacy of diet and blood pressure medication adherence on uncontrolled hypertension among congregants in these communities. Preliminary efforts with Drs. Reed, Wilbur, and colleagues essentially targets the same communities but through the middle schools where I have advised on the adoption of dietary assessment tools that are acceptable to these youth. In addition, my collaboration with Drs Staffileno and Fogg for over a decade has also focused on web-based diet interventions among young African American women with prehypertension or hypertension. I was the Nutritionist involved in plan of the WHI dietary modification trial under Drs. Black, Mason and Powell, and the P/I for a previously completed American Cancer Society grant testing 2 delivery methods for weight management counseling among overweight and obese breast cancer survivors. I have had extensive experience in dietary assessment of Hispanic children, adolescents and adults, African American mother-daughter dyads (Reed, M, 2021) along with clinical and community based bi-racial cohorts of adults, i.e., the Chicago Health and Aging Project (CHAP). I managed the calibration study for CHAP, a more than 20-year long cohort of older adults where I served as the Nutritionist for this cohort study working with the late Dr Martha C Morris, and for another cohort, the Memory Aging Project in which annual dietary, blood, and brain tissues are acquired and for which serum dietary biomarkers were used to validate our dietary measures. For more than 30 years, I have examined the role of healthy diet patterns --- DASH, Mediterranean, HEI 2010, and MIND with respect to cognitive decline and incident hypertension.
Thursday, June 16, 2022
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM ET
Disclosure(s): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.