Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
-

Abstract

Nutritional epidemiology plays a critical role in understanding the relationship between diet and risk of chronic diseases. With recent advances in omics technologies including genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and metagenomics, there are new opportunities to explore biological mechanisms underlying diet, metabolic pathways, and health outcomes. In my presentation, I will discuss our efforts to incorporate omics technologies especially high throughput metabolomics into our large cohort studies including the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals' Follow-up Study as well as the PREDIMED trial. The integration of omics data in nutritional epidemiology holds great promises in identifying novel biomarkers for dietary intakes and predicting future disease risk. The repeated measures of diet enable us to examine long-term relationships between dietary factors and chronic disease risk and whether these associations are mediated or modified by individuals' metabolic profiles. These analyses have the potential to facilitate more effective precision or personalized nutrition interventions. Continued efforts and collaboration are necessary to fully leverage the potential of omics data in nutritional epidemiologic research and chronic disease prevention.

Dr. Frank Hu

Franck Hu

Dr. Frank Hu is Chair of Department of Nutrition, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Hu received his MD from Tongji Medical College in China and MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from University of Illinois at Chicago. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Nutritional Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Hu's major research interests include epidemiology and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions; nutritional metabolomics; and nutrition transitions in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, he is Director of Boston Nutrition and Obesity Research Center Epidemiology and Genetics Core and Director of Dietary Biomarker Development Center at Harvard University. He has published a textbook on Obesity Epidemiology (Oxford University Press) and >1400 peer-reviewed papers with an H-index of 290. He served on the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease, the Obesity Guideline Expert Panel, American Heart Association Nutrition Committee, and the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, USDA/HHS. He has served on the editorial boards of Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Diabetes Care, and Clinical Chemistry. Dr. Hu was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015.

Speaker(s)

Prof. Frank Hu

Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Mass