Hua Fang
Yeshiva University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
What people eat changes over years and decades, and those changes may shape their risk of chronic disease. Researchers now have long-term diet records from many studies.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Mathematics & Statistics
Computer Science
- Topics
diet quality
dietary patterns
nutrition epidemiology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Adapt a visualization-aided trajectory pattern-recognition and validation algorithm into iPAT, an intelligent, streamlined tool for finding and checking diet-quality patterns in longitudinal dietary data.
- Identify diet-quality trajectory patterns across more than 20 harmonized datasets from Massachusetts trials, the Women's Health Initiative and the CARDIA study, and relate them to multiple chronic disease outcomes.
- Examine how diet-quality patterns vary by culture, age, geography and time using harmonized data spanning up to 35 years and 50 centers.
- Build an accessible, expandable harmonized dietary database and release the iPAT tool as open access for diet-related studies.
More about the research
However, methods for tracing how a person's diet quality rises or falls over time, and for checking that such patterns are real, are still basic. That leaves the link between diet and health unclear and weakens the evidence behind dietary guidelines. This project brings machine learning and pattern-recognition tools to long-term dietary data.
Why it matters
Clearer, validated diet-quality patterns could strengthen the evidence used to write national dietary guidelines and clarify how eating habits relate to chronic diseases across ages, cultures and regions. An open tool could let researchers and the public compare an individual's diet with local and national patterns and their associated health risks, and could eventually support personalized, adaptive dietary strategies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Harmonize and bridge seven national cohort datasets, including Add Health, PSID, REGARDS and HRS, into a synthetic, nationally representative cohort that tracks chronic disease from age 30.
Jiwoo Lee
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Describe the sites and participating families of the USDA Summer Food Service Program in the Twin Cities to evaluate how the program is currently delivered, using surveys of children and parents recruited at program sites.
Alexis Battle
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Computer Science
Mentor early-stage investigators in study design, data pipelines and quantitative methods for multimodal, longitudinal data in aging and Alzheimer's disease research.
The school
Yeshiva University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $10M a year on research, 81 research doctorates a year.
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