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Biographical Sketches of the Speakers and Moderators

Rodolphe Barrangou, Ph.D., is the T. R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University (NC State). Dr. Barrangou is focusing on characterizing CRISPR-Cas systems and their applications in bacteria, especially to study and develop probiotics, including for genotyping, phage resistance, screening, genome editing, and antimicrobials. He spent 9 years at Danisco and DuPont and has been at NC State since 2013. For his CRISPR work, he received several international awards, notably the Canada Gairdner International Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Barrangou earned a B.S. in biological sciences from Rene Descartes University, France, an M.S. in biological engineering from the University of Technology in Compiegne, France, an M.S. in food science from NC State, a Ph.D. in genomics from NC State, and an M.B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also the former chair of the board of Caribou Biosciences, a cofounder of Intellia Therapeutics, Locus Biosciences, TreeCo, Ancilia Biosciences and CRISPR Biotechnologies, an advisor to Inari Ag, Invaio, Provaxus, Felix Biotech, the IGI, and editor in chief of CRISPR Journal.

Sai Krupa Das, Ph.D., is a senior scientist on the Energy Metabolism Team at the Jean Mayer USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging and professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, both at Tufts University. She has more than 20 years of experience in human nutrition research and in the field of energy metabolism. She has examined energy expenditure in adults with

varying weight status and is an expert on doubly labeled water and other methodologies for measuring energy intake and expenditure and body composition. Dr. Das has conducted several clinical trials involving lifestyle interventions for attenuating age-related changes and targeting the obesity epidemic, including employees at worksites, hard-to-reach segments of the general population, military families, and people from around the world who face weight-related health challenges. She is widely published for her ongoing work on the landmark Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy trial, the first and largest randomized controlled trial of calorie restriction in humans. Her publications include A Standard Calculation Methodology for Human Doubly Labeled Water Studies, Evaluation of PIQNIQ, a Novel Mobile Application for Capturing Dietary Intake, and Opportunities and Challenges of Technology Tools in Dietary and Activity Assessment: Bridging Stakeholder Viewpoints. Dr. Das is executive director of the International Weight Control Registry, clinical center principal investigator (PI) and cochair of the Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) Consortium, and a member of the Energy and Macronutrient Metabolism Research Interest Group of the American Society of Nutrition, Obesity Society, and Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Das holds a Ph.D. in human nutrition from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Cindy D. Davis, Ph.D., serves as national program leader for the USDA-ARS in human nutrition program, where she helps direct the scientific program for six Human Nutrition Research Centers. Earlier, she was the director of Grants and Extramural Activities in the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), where she actively engaged and encouraged partnerships with other National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes and centers to develop a portfolio that advances both nutritional and botanical dietary supplement research for optimizing public health. Dr. Davis is also actively involved in a number of government working groups focused on the microbiome, including as a cofounder and cochair of the Joint Agency Microbiome (NIH, Food and Drug Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and USDA) working group. Before ODS, she was a program director in the Nutritional Sciences Research Group at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). She completed her postdoctoral training at the Laboratory of Experimental Carcinogenesis at NCI and joined the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center, USDA, as a research nutritionist. In 2000, she received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and was named the USDA Early Career Scientist. She has published more than 135 peer-reviewed journal articles and 11 invited book chapters. She is a supplement editor for the Journal of Nutrition, assistant editor for Nutrition Reviews, and member of the editorial board for Advances in Nutrition.

Dr. Davis received her B.S. in nutritional sciences with honors from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and her Ph.D. in nutrition with a minor in human cancer biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Elenna Dugundji, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Transportation and Logistics. She shapes supply chain futures by bringing expertise in demand forecasting, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to research in mainport logistics, involving network analytics, optimization of operational processes, tactical planning and strategic asset management. She received her Ph.D. in environmental sciences from the University of Amsterdam.

Judy Gichoya, M.D., is an associate professor at Emory University in interventional radiology and informatics. Her career focus is on validating ML models for health in real clinical settings, exploring explainability, fairness, and specifically how algorithms fail. She is heavily invested in training the next generation of data scientists through multiple high school programs. At Emory, she is the program director for radiology, sits on the AI Humanity Advisory Group, serves on the AI trainee editorial board, and teaches the medical students’ ML elective.

Chris Hartshorn, Ph.D., is the chief of the Digital & Mobile Technologies Section and acting chief of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program Branch within the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Division of Clinical Innovation, where he manages and coordinates programmatic and research activities. Earlier, he served as a program director in the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis. During his tenure at NIH, he has guided and managed multiple programs, including its Academic–Industrial Partnerships, NPH, and Bridge to Artificial Intelligence. Through these programs, he established the AI for Multimodal Data Modeling and Bioinformatics Center and several corollary efforts for the NCI Strategic Plan for AI/ML in Cancer. A principal focus has been creating initiatives to bring more care to more patients remotely via sophisticated multimodal analytical methods, AI, and novel biomedical technologies. Before NIH, he was a research staff member at the National Institute of Standards and Technology for projects focused on biomedical and national security applications and then collaborations with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Justice, NIH, Merck, and Pfizer.

Janie Simms Hipp, J.D., is the inaugural president and chief executive officer of Native Agriculture Financial Services, the first-ever Other Financing Institution within the Farm Credit System that will fund Native farmers and ranchers. She served as general counsel for the U.S. Department of

Agriculture, the first Native American in that role. She is the founder of the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Tribal Relations in the Office of the Secretary and founding executive director of the Native American Agriculture Fund. She has also served on two delegations to the United Nations regarding women’s and Indigenous issues. As an agriculture and food lawyer and policy expert, she focuses on the intersection of Indian law and agriculture and food law. She earned her J.D. from Oklahoma City University School of Law and an M.A. in agricultural law from the University of Arkansas School of Law.

Becca B. R. Jablonski, Ph.D., is the codirector of the Food Systems Institute at Colorado State University, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and a 2022–2023 US–UK Fulbright fellow. Her research investigates the roles of cities in leveraging food policies to achieve progress toward sustainable development (e.g., food and nutrition security, farm and ranch viability, regional economic development, and environmental sustainability), highlighting trade-offs of different policy approaches and interventions. She pays particular attention to the geographic dimensions of impacts; she undertakes disciplinary research and large-scale quantitative modeling projects and leads engaged community processes. She works at local, regional, national, and international scales. Among other honors, Dr. Jablonski won the 2020 Distinguished Extension/Outreach Program Award from the Applied Agricultural Economics Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Abraham Lincoln Award (the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture’s Honor Award). She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She was a 2019 speaker/participant in the National Academies Food Forum Workshop on Innovations in the Food System: Shaping the Future of Food.

Sharon I. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., is associate professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Kirkpatrick’s research focuses on the intersections between nutrition, human and planetary health, equity, and policy, using a systems thinking lens. Much of her work is aimed at improving methodologies for measuring dietary patterns to foster robust evidence on how these influence human and planetary health and how to promote healthy and sustainable eating practices. She is a member of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism, and Diabetes Institute Advisory Board and Health Canada Nutrition Science Advisory Committee. Dr. Kirkpatrick is a registered dietitian and holds a Ph.D. in nutritional sciences (2008) and M.H.Sc. in community nutrition (2002) from the University of Toronto, a B.A.Sc. in applied human nutrition (2000) from the University of Guelph, and a B.Kin. in kinesiology (1996) from McMaster University.

Rob Knight, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and professor of pediatrics, bioengineering, data science, and computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His research has linked microbes to a range of health conditions, enhanced our understanding of microbes in many environments, and made high-throughput sequencing accessible to thousands of researchers worldwide. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including QIIME and UniFrac. He is cofounder of the Earth Microbiome Project, American Gut Project, and Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfield decisions. He set up and runs the wastewater COVID-19 detection program and cofounded the COVID-19 testing lab at UCSD, which performs thousands of clinical tests per day and also sequences viral genomes out of wastewater and clinical samples. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Academy of Microbiology and received the 2019 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and 2017 Massry Prize. Dr. Knight earned his B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Otago and his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Princeton University.

Benoît Lamarche, Ph.D., is a full professor at the School of Nutrition at Université Laval and scientific director and founder of the FRQS-funded NUTRISS. He has published more than 420 peer-reviewed papers on physiological, clinical, epidemiological, and public health issues related to food and health. He leads NutriQuébec, the largest population-based study on nutrition and health funded by the government of Quebec. He has contributed to training more than 70 MSc, Ph.D., and postdoc students. He has received numerous awards, including from the Quebec Society of Lipidology, Nutrition, and Metabolism (Prix des Fondateurs, 2013) and Canadian Nutrition Society (Centrum New Investigator Award, 2011, and Khursheed Jeejeebhoy Award, 2020). He has cowritten two books with the acclaimed chef Jean Soulard on the topics of nutrition, sports, and health. He is an Olympian (1984, 1988) in long track speed skating.

Anant Madabhushi, Ph.D., is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Biomedical Engineering and on the faculty in the Departments of Pathology, Biomedical Informatics, and Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University. He is also a research health scientist at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center. Dr. Madabhushi has authored more than 475 peer-reviewed publications and has more than 100 patents issued or pending. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and National Academy of Inventors. His work “Smart

Imaging Computers for Identifying Lung Cancer Patients Who Need Chemotherapy” was labeled by Prevention Magazine as one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2018. In 2019, Nature Magazine hailed him as one of five scientists developing “offbeat and innovative approaches for cancer research.” Dr. Madabhushi was named to the Pathologist’s Power List in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Susan McRitchie, M.A., M.S., is the lead biostatistician and program manager in the Metabolomics and Exposome Laboratory at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC–Chapel Hill) Nutrition Research Institute. She has more than 10 years of experience analyzing metabolomics and exposome data that support research in precision nutrition, precision health, and precision environmental health. Ms. McRitchie has experience analyzing data using a variety of methods, including quadratic growth curves, ordinal logistic regression, logistic regression, multiple linear regression, principal component analysis, orthogonal projection to latent structures discriminant analysis, structural equation modeling, and random forest. She is also the program coordinator for the Metabolomics and Clinical Assays Center in the NIH Common Fund NPH Consortium. Ms. McRitchie earned her M.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her M.S. in biostatistics from UNC–Chapel Hill.

Saurabh Mehta, M.B.B.S., Sc.D., is a physician with training and expertise in nutrition, infectious disease, epidemiology, and diagnostics. He is a faculty member in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University and on its executive leadership team. Additionally, he also serves as the director of the Program in International Nutrition and the cofounding director of the new Center for NPH. He also coleads the NIH NPH Research Coordinating Center. The central theme of Dr. Mehta’s research is the interplay between nutrition and disease, including facilitating field-friendly assessment for both, and elucidating how nutrition can be used as a modifiable risk factor for improving health and associated outcomes, often in the context of pregnancy and early childhood, through a combination of active surveillance programs, invention of point-of-care diagnostics, and randomized controlled trials primarily in resource-limited settings in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America. His research program is supported by funding from NIH, the National Science Foundation, USDA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Health Organization, and the Department of Defense, among others. Dr. Mehta is also the director of a new training program on AI and Precision Nutrition supported by NIH.

Christopher Mejía-Argueta, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He is a supply chain specialist whose

research focuses on improving the efficiency and flexibility of operations in multiple stakeholders, addressing changing purchasing patterns, and coupling these dynamic consumer profiles with the retail landscape. He founded and directed the MIT Food and Retail Operations Lab, a global, interdisciplinary research group that combats food malnutrition, reduces food waste, ensures food safety, empowers smallholder farming, and builds local, short food supply chains using data- and model-driven approaches. Dr. Mejía leads research networks and educational programs for Latin America and the Caribbean with top-ranked universities and research groups. He has more than 14 years of experience and has developed dozens of applied research projects for companies, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral funding sources, and governments in more than 12 countries on three continents.

Holly Nicastro, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a program director in the NIH Office of Nutrition Research, where she serves as coordinator for NPH, powered by the All of Us Research Program. In this role, she is responsible for overall management of the NPH consortium, progress toward the program’s goals, and monitoring of interactions between the consortium and the external community. Dr. Nicastro holds a B.Sc. in nutritional sciences from Pennsylvania State University, a Ph.D. in molecular and biochemical nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with NCI’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program, where she worked in the Nutritional Science Research Group.

Angela Odoms-Young, Ph.D. (she/her/hers), is the Nancy Schlegel Meinig Associate Professor of Maternal and Child Nutrition and director of the Food and Nutrition Education in Communities Program and New York State Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program at Cornell University. Her research explores social and structural determinants of dietary behaviors and diet-related diseases in low-income and Black/Latinx populations and centers on identifying culturally appropriate programs and policies that promote health equity, food justice, and community resilience. Dr. Odoms-Young has more than 20 years of experience partnering with communities to improve nutrition and health and 200+ academic publications, book chapters, and presentations. She has served on numerous advisory committees and boards, including the National Academy of Sciences Food and Nutrition Board, Institute of Medicine committees to develop the nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program/School Breakfast Program and revise the food packages provided in the Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and Council on Black Health. Dr. Odoms-Young was also a member of the Board of the Greater Chicago Food Depository and is a mem-

ber of the American Heart Association Chicago Metro Board, Grow Greater Englewood, and Blacks in Green. She is the inaugural Equity Visiting Scholar at Feeding America. Dr. Odoms-Young received her B.S. in foods and nutrition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and M.S./Ph.D. in community nutrition from Cornell University. Additionally, she completed a Family Research Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship examining family processes in diverse populations at Pennsylvania State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Community Health Scholars Fellowship in community-based participatory research at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Before joining Cornell, Dr. Odoms-Young served on the faculty at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition.

Edward Sazonov (IEEE M’02, SM’11) received a systems engineer diploma from Khabarovsk State University of Technology, Russia, in 1993 and a Ph.D. in computer engineering from West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, in 2002. He is a James R. Cudworth Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, and the head of the Computer Laboratory of Ambient and Wearable Systems (http://claws.eng.ua.edu). His research interests span wearable devices, sensor-based behavioral informatics and methods of biomedical signal processing, ML, and AI. Devices developed in his laboratory include a wearable sensor for objective detection and characterization of food intake (Automatic Ingestion Monitor); a highly accurate physical activity and gait monitor integrated into a shoe insole (SmartStep, winner of Bluetooth Innovation WorldCup 2009); and a wearable sensor system for monitoring cigarette smoking (PACT). The research in his lab was recognized by several awards, including best paper awards and the president’s research award at the University of Alabama. In 2020, Dr. Sazonov served as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research has been supported by NIH, National Science Foundation, National Academies, and state agencies, private industry, and foundations. Dr. Sazonov is a specialty chief editor for Wearable Electronics and Frontiers in Electronics and associate editor for several IEEE journals.

Aaron Smith, Ph.D., is the DeLoach Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he has been since 2001. Originally from New Zealand, he earned his Ph.D. in economics from UCSD. His research addresses economic and policy challenges related to agriculture, energy, and the environment. He has more than 50 publications in refereed journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His research has

won the Quality of Communication, Quality of Research Discovery, and Outstanding American Journal of Agricultural Economics Article awards from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and Quality of Research Discovery Award from the European Association of Agricultural Economists. He is the cluster lead for socioeconomics and ethics in the AI Institute for the Food System.

Patrick J. Stover, Ph.D., is the director of the Institute for Advancing Health through Agriculture (IHA) at Texas A&M University, the world’s first research institute to bring together precision nutrition, responsive agriculture, and behavioral research to reduce diet-related chronic disease in a way that considers environmental and economic effects. With support from USDA and Texas, the IHA includes an embedded USDA program. As an international leader in biochemistry, agriculture, and nutrition, Stover focuses on the biological mechanisms that underlie the relationships between food and human pathologies, such as birth defects, neuropathies, and cancer. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also former president of the American Society for Nutrition and served two terms on the National Academies Food and Nutrition Board. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Clinton, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

Carmen D. Tekwe, Ph.D., is an associate professor of biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor of biostatistics at Texas A&M University before joining Indiana University in 2019. Her research interests include developing statistical methodology to better assess big data, such as wearable-device-based measures, dietary intake surveys, and radiation risk assessments. She is the PI of a National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases–funded R01 focused on statistical methods for measurement error correction in device-based measures of physical activity and self-reported dietary intake. She recently served as a consultant to the Committee on Dietary Reference Intakes Working Group at the National Academies. She is a scientific committee member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements Scientific Committee 1-28 and a member of the Scientific Leadership Council for the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences, an associate editor for Statistics in Medicine, and an ad hoc grant reviewer for NIH. She received both her B.A. and M.A. in statistics from the University of Florida and earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University at Buffalo in 2011.

Diana M. Thomas, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996. She completed a National Research Council–funded postdoctoral fellowship at the U.S. Military Academy and Army Research Laboratory. In 2000, she joined the faculty of Montclair State University, where she was a professor of mathematics and director of the Center for Quantitative Obesity Research. Dr. Thomas is a professor of mathematical sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Dr. Thomas has been an active research mathematician for over 25 years, with a focus on nutrition and obesity related modeling. She is an associate editor for the world’s top-ranked journal for original research in nutrition, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and coedits the series “Best (but oft-forgotten) practices,” which consists of methodologic commentaries or statistical tutorials. Dr. Thomas is the PI of the Artificial Intelligence, Data Engineering, & Machine Learning Center for the NPH Consortium and cochair for the Steering Committee. She has held governance positions in the Obesity Society, American Society of Nutrition, and Mathematical Association of America.

Jennifer Tiller, M.P.A., M.B.A., serves as the deputy staff director for the House Committee on Agriculture under the leadership of Chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA). Ms. Tiller was both deputy staff director and senior professional staff for Chair K. Michael Conaway (R-TX). She has worked on a variety of legislative efforts affecting U.S. agriculture and domestic nutrition programs, including the 2018 Farm Bill, pandemic-related aid packages, and bills impacting federal spending and revenues. A Syracuse, New York, native, Ms. Tiller holds an M.P.A. from Marist College and M.B.A. from Syracuse University.