Nutrition
Explore how nutrition impacts health and well-being through research, education, and service.
In this track, you’ll be engaged in a variety of nutrition-related experiences through our two BSPH degree programs: Nutrition Health & Society and Nutrition Science & Research. You’ll meet the faculty you’d be learning from and working with and learn about what topics are covered in our BSPH courses. Our department has state-of-the-art facilities, including research labs and a teaching kitchen. You’ll rotate between the lab, the kitchen, and the field, where you’ll explore how to create a healthy snack and how the nutrients in that snack impact the body. You’ll tour labs and see how to collect and analyze samples and extract DNA. You’ll tour our student-athletes’ nutrition and eating facilities to see how we fuel our students for competition and life. If you are interested in how food impacts the body, how policies and history shape access to healthy food, and how to shape healthy behaviors for obesity prevention, this is the track for you.
Instructor: Molly De Marco
Dr. De Marco conducts research on determinants of health disparities, community food security and active living and focuses on community-based research that engages low-income and historically marginalized populations. For 20 years, she has used community-engagement strategies including use of community advisory boards and equitable compensation of those with lived experience of poverty and food insecurity as experts and human-centered design when conducting her research.
Instructor: Ian Carroll
The goals of the Carroll Lab are to determine the mechanisms through which the intestinal microbiota or its metabolites influence gastrointestinal physiology, behavior and adiposity/weight regulation with a view to developing novel nutritional-based therapies for disease. Dr. Carroll’s laboratory uses molecular techniques to characterize the intestinal microbiota in both human and mouse models of nutritional-based diseases. Our investigations ultimately will contribute to understanding host-microbe interactions, where the knowledge gained can be applied to enhance health and reduce illness.