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Nov. 1, 2025 – Our lab PI, Dr. Wood and other CNRC faculty had a great time speaking at Sigma Xi’s iFORE 2025 Conference!

Dr. Wood and her CNRC colleagues, who come from a variety of research backgrounds, spoke about their goal to leverage the social ecological model to develop effective, sustainable solutions for improving diet quality among US children.

Specifically, Dr. Wood discussed her research on how precision nutrition tailors dietary intake to most benefit a person’s health. Dr. Sheryl Hughes spoke about her research on the role of family in child eating behaviors, and Dr. Jayna Dave on her research on the importance of the broader community in children’s health. Dr. Stephanie Sisley gave her perspective as a pediatric endocrinologist on the importance of tying all these influences together in her clinical practice.

Oct. 27, 2025 – Welcome to our team, Ms. Sandra Yun! Sandra recently moved to Houston from San Diego, where she spent 5 years as an epidemiologist for the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Department. Sandra joins our growing data science team and its work developing and applying rigorous, reproducible workflows for the large-scale analyses of the proteome and metabolome, as it related to nutrition and health across the lifespan.

Oct. 3, 2025 – We were delighted that our collaborator, Jiantao Ma, had his R01 proposal “Multiethnic and multiomics analysis of longitudinal changes in DNA methylation and Cardiovascular health”, funded! The American Heart Association’s “” provides a checklist of eight key measures for improving and maintaining cardiovascular health. We will collaborate on Dr. Ma’s project to identify areas of the genome where gene expression (the “turning off and on” of genes) responds to the lifestyle changes advised in the Life’s Essential 8 checklist, to better understand why this advice helps preserve heart health as we age. Congratulations to Dr. Ma!

Oct. 1, 2025 – Our collaborative paper “Sleep-disordered breathing subtypes and future diet quality in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis” was published in the journal Sleep Health. Thank you to Dr. Kaitlin Potts at Brigham and Women’s & Harvard Medical School for your leadership on this project!

Oct. 1, 2025 – Our abstract entitled “Leveraging Longitudinal ‘Omics Data to Improve Our Understanding of the Effects of Diet on Health: The Example of Red Meat”, was one of the top-rated abstract submissions, and won a conference award for the upcoming Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research (CHARGE) International Conference. Dr. Alexis Wood is excited to present our work shedding new light on how red meat relates to health at the CHARGE conference in North Carolina this December.  

Sept. 19, 2025 – Dr. Alexis Wood loved speaking to parents of toddlers at the Family Place "Play, Grow, & Learn" Workshop at West University Branch Library about the importance of good nutrition in the early years. Thank you to all the wonderful participants for your engagement and interest and to all the children who played games with Dr. Wood!

Sept. 18, 2025 – Dr. Wood was selected to receive the 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Recognition award by the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, for her service reviewing manuscript submissions this past year. Congratulations!

Sept. 17, 2025 – Happy birthday to Martin Chen, our biostatistician!

Aug. 25, 2025 – Tobias Kornfein, a Rice Undergraduate, started his second internship with our group. Tobias will be continuing his work using large-scale metabolomic data from the TEDDY study to identify which foods might support cognitive development during toddlerhood. Welcome back, Tobias – we are so glad you are sticking with our team!