Precision Nutrition Forum and PREDIMED Omics Symposium 2025

• The Inn at Longwood Medical, 342 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA (0.3 miles away)
• Residence Inn Boston Back Bay/Fenway, 125 Brookline Ave, Boston, MA (0.6 miles away)
• Hilton Garden Inn Boston Brookline, 700 Brookline Ave, Brookline, MA (0.9 miles away)

Location: Rotunda Room

[8:00-8:45 am EST]
Registration, coffee, and light refreshments

[8:45-9:00 am EST]
Introduction
Frank Hu, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA
Rikard Landberg, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

[9:00 – 10:35 am EST]
Precision nutrition: Current state of the evidence
Session Chair: Marta Guasch-Ferré, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

[9:00-9:25 am EST]
Precision public health in the era of genomics and big data
Andrea Baccarelli, Dean of the Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA

[9:25-9:50 am EST]
NIH nutrition for precision health
Sai Das, Senior Scientist, Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging; Professor, Tufts University, MA, USA

[9:50-10:15 am EST]
Precision nutrition and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases – opportunities and challenges
Stine Ulven, University of Oslo, Norway

[10:15-10:35 am EST]
Session panel discussion

[10:35-11:00 am EST]
Coffee break

[11:00 am – 12:35 pm EST]
Gut microbiome for precision nutrition
Session Chair: Clemens Wittenbecher, Assistant Professor, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

[11:00-11:25 am EST]
Recent advances in nutrition and gut microbiome research
Curtis Huttenhower, Professor, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA

[11:25 am-11:50 am EST]
Dietary fiber intervention studies and the gut microbiome
Jens Walter, Professor, University College Cork, Ireland

[11:50 am-12:15 pm EST]
Gut microbiota and energy metabolism – implications for precision nutrition
Rachel Carmody, Harvard University, MA, USA

[12:15 -12:35 pm EST]
Session panel discussion

[12:35-1:35 pm EST]
Poster session
Location: Lobby

[1:35 – 3:35 pm EST]
New technologies and AI
Session Chair: Jordi Merino, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

[1:35-2:00 pm EST]
Longitudinal multi-omic profiling in precision nutrition interventions
Michael Snyder, Stanford University, CA, USA

[2:00-2:25 pm EST]
Wearable devices in precision nutrition
David Kerr, Senior Investigator, Sutter Center for Health Systems Research, CA, USA

[2:25-2:50 pm EST]
Big data and AI in nutrition and obesity research
Diana Tomas, United States Military Academy, NY, USA

[2:50-3:15 pm EST]
Network analysis and the Foodome Project
Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University, MA, USA

[3:15-3:35 pm EST]
Session panel discussion

[3:35-4.00 pm EST]
Coffee break

[4:00-5:00 pm EST]
Young investigator lightning talks

[5:00-6:00 pm EST]
Reception and poster session
Location: Lobby

Location: Rotunda Room

[8:00-8:45 am EST]
Coffee and light refreshments

[8:45-9:00 am EST]
Introduction
Frank Hu, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, USA
Miguel Martínez-González, University of Navarra, Spain

[9:00 – 10:35 am EST]
Deciphering the mechanisms of the Mediterranean Diet
Session Chair: Jordi Salas-Salvadó, Professor, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain

[9:00-9:25 am EST]
Clinical trials of the Mediterranean Diet on cardiometabolic diseases
Miguel Ruiz-Canela, Professor, University of Navarra, Spain

[9:25—9:50 am EST]
Leveraging omics to understand personalized responses to dietary interventions
Iris Shai, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

[9:50—10:15 am EST]
Mediterranean Diet and chronic kidney disease
José María Mora, University of Navarra, Spain

[10:15—10:35 am EST]
Session panel discussion

[10:35-11:00 am EST]
Coffee break

[11:00 am – 1:00 pm EST]
Omic biomarkers of diet
Session Chair: Danielle Haslam, Instructor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

[11:00-11:25 am EST]
Food based biomarkers using metabolomics
Lorraine Brennan, University College Dublin, Ireland

[11:25 – 11:50 am EST]
Mediterranean Diet and epigenetics
Jose Alfredo Martínez Hernández, Professor, Institute IMDEA Food, Spain

[11:50 – 12:15 am EST]
Dietary Biomarker Development Center Consortium updates
Qi Sun, Associate Professor, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA

[12:15 am -12:40 pm EST]
Metabolomic signatures of the Mediterranean Diet and longevity
Estefania Toledo, University of Navarra

[12:40 -1:00 pm EST]
Session panel discussion

[1:00-2:00 pm EST]
Poster session
Location: Lobby

[2:00 – 3:30 pm EST]
Precision nutrition in weight loss diets
Session Chair: Ramón Estruch, University of Barcelona, Spain

[2:00-2:25 pm EST]
Omnivorous vs. vegan diets in identical twins
Christopher Gardner, Professor, Stanford University, CA, USA

[2:25-2:50 pm EST]
Intermittent fasting and cardiometabolic health
Courtney Peterson, Associate Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL, USA

[2:50-3:15 pm EST]
Metabolic effects of the ketogenic diet and exercise
Antonio Paoli, Professor, University of Padova, Italy

[3:15-3:30 pm EST]
Session panel discussion

[3:30-3:45 pm EST]
Coffee break

[3:45-4:45 pm EST]
Panel discussion: The role of nutrition and lifestyle in the GLP-1 agonist era

Moderator: 

• Ming Yang, Senior Editor, Nature Medicine, Springer Nature, United Kingdom

Panelists:

• Fatima Cody Stanford, Associate Professor, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, MA, USA

• Steven Heymsfield, Professor, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, LA, USA
• Walter C. Willett, Professor, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA

[4:45-5:00 pm EST]
Concluding remarks
Frank Hu, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, MA, USA
Miguel Martínez-González, University of Navarra, Spain
Jordi Salas-Salvadó, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain

[5:00-5:45 pm EST]
Reception and poster session
Location: Lobby

Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, is the Dean of the Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work on the health impact of environmental exposures has been used by agencies worldwide to shape pollution control policies. Dr. Baccarelli previously served as chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, director of the NIH/NIEHS P30 Center for Environmental Health and Justice and president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Baccarelli holds an MD from the University of Perugia in Italy, an MS in Epidemiology from the University of Turin, and a PhD from the University of Milan.

Albert-László Barabási is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science at Northeastern University as well as in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and he is a visiting professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University in Budapest. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Master’s in Theoretical Physics at the Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. Barabási is the author several general audience books, like “The Formula: The Science of Success (2018)” “Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do” (2010), “Linked: The New Science of Networks” (2002) and of the textbooks Network Science (2020) and the monograph Science of Science (coathored with Dashun Wang).

Barabasi’s work lead to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999 and proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.

Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the recipient of the 2023 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of APS. He was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology in 2005 and the John von Neumann Medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society from Hungary, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology in 2006. He has been elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004) and the Academia Europaea (2007). He received the C&C Prize from the NEC C&C Foundation in 2008. In 2009 the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize. In 2011 Barabási was awarded the Lagrange Prize-CRT Foundation for his contributions to complex systems, awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, became an elected Fellow in AAAS (Physics), and is a 2013 Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences.

Lorraine Brennan a full professor and a PI in the UCD Institute of Food & Health and Conway institute. She is the Vice Principal for Research, Innovation and Impact for the College of Health and Agricultural Sciences. She leads a research group at the forefront of the application of metabolomics in nutrition research and the development of Personalized nutrition. She is an ERC awardee and is currently involved in three European Consortia- MUSAE, PlantIntake and Promed-cog. She served as Director of the European Nutrigenomics Organization for 5 years and led a number of important initiatives such as the development of an Early Career Network and expansion of membership of the organization. She is a member of the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Standing Committee on Evidence Synthesis and Communications in Diet and Chronic Disease Relationships – advising the US NIH and USDA on future research areas of priority. She was a member of the Food2030 Expert group to advise the European Commission with the development of FOOD2030 and exploring and formulating possible future R&I policy recommendations and actions and assessing their potential impacts.

Dr. Rachel Carmody is the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology and Principal Investigator of the Nutritional & Microbial Ecology Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research seeks to understand how the human body acquires and utilizes energy, and how past changes in energy budget have shaped human evolution. Within the past two decades, it has become clear that energy metabolism is modulated by the gut microbiome via diverse pathways affecting energy intake, expenditure, and allocation. Dr. Carmody’s work therefore considers the human body as an ecosystem, integrating perspectives and techniques from evolutionary biology, nutrition, physiology, microbiology, and metagenomics to pursue a richer understanding of energy metabolism. Currently, her group is employing this ecosystem approach to study the caloric consequences of host-microbiome interactions, effects of the social transmission of microbes on non-communicable disease risk and resilience, gut microbial plasticity as a force in human adaptation, and what makes the human microbiome unique. Dr. Carmody completed her Ph.D. in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a postdoc in Microbiology & Immunology at UCSF as an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Fellow. Her research is supported by NSF, NIH, and The Leakey Foundation.

Sai Krupa Das, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, and Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, at Tufts University, Boston, USA. Dr. Das is internationally recognized for her work in nutrition and aging, and the role of diet in reducing chronic disease risk and obesity. Dr. Das is a Principal Investigator for the New England Clinical Center, which is part of the NIH Common Fund Initiative’s Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH). In addition, Dr. Das is leading the CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) Legacy Study, which is a long-term follow-up study of CALERIE, the first, largest, multi-site randomized controlled trial of calorie restriction in humans. Dr. Das is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee for the Review of the Dietary Reference Intake Framework, and is the Co-Executive Director of the International Weight Control Registry. She is a member of the American Society of Nutrition, the Obesity Society and the Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Das holds a Ph.D. in Human Nutrition from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston, USA.

Professor Ramon Estruch is Senior Consultant of the Internal Medicine Department of the Hospital Clinic, Professor of Medicine at the University of Barcelona, Director of the Research Group on Nutrition, Cardiovascular Disease and Aging of IDIBAPS (Institut d’ Investigació August Pi i Sunyer ) at Barcelona, and Member of the Scientific Board of the CIBER Pathophysiology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBER obn) at the Instituto de Salud Carlos (Madrid), Spain. The main research lines are: 1) Cardiovascular effects of Mediterranean diet; 2) Effects of olive oil in cardiovascular risk factors, and oxidative stress and inflammatory biomarkers related to atherosclerosis; 3) Mechanisms of the effects of wine and beer on health. He has been the Director of the PREDIMED trial and Member of the Steering Committee of the Predimed-Plus trial. He has published 716 manuscripts in high-impact journals with 61,978 citations. In the years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 has been named one of the most influential scientists in the world (“Highly Cited Researcher” by Claryvate Analytics). His “H” index is 132 (Google Scholar).

For more than 30 years Christopher Gardner, PhD, Rehnborg Farquhar professor of medicine at Stanford, and nutrition scientist, has studied what to consume and to avoid for optimal health, and how best to motivate individuals to achieve healthy dietary behaviors. He recently completed a 2-year term serving on the US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and is the past chair of the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee. He has conducted and published dozens of human nutrition intervention trials, including trials of Mediterranean, Ketogenic, Vegan, Low-Fat and Low-Carb diets and their effects on cardiometabolic health. Some of his current interests include Stealth Nutrition, Unapologetic Deliciousness and Institutional Food Settings. He is currently working on personalized nutrition explorations with several colleagues, with particular focus on the gut microbiome. Professor Gardner’s work was recently featured in a Netflix docuseries (Jan 2024) – “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”.

Miguel A. Martínez-González, MD, PhD is Professor of Public Health (University of Navarra, Spain), and Adjunct Professor at Harvard TH School of Public Health (Nutrition). Founder of the Department of Public Health at the University of Navarra and Principal Investigator of large cohorts and randomized trials (SUN, PREDIMED, PREDIMED-Plus and UNATI), he was co-PI, with Frank B. Hu, in several NIH-funded grants on cardiometabolic disease and metabolomics. He has published more than 1400 articles and abstracts indexed in Web of Science and has been mentor of a large group of Full Professors and Associate Professors of Epidemiology and Public Health.

Marta Guasch-Ferré is an Associate Professor and Group leader at the Department of Public Health and Novo Nordisk Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She also holds an appointment as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, U.S. Dr. Guasch-Ferré leads a research group mainly focused on integrating nutrition and lifestyle factors with –omics data to advance the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases. She has authored numerous publications in leading scientific journals, contributing significantly to the field of nutritional and cardiovascular epidemiology.

Dr. José María Mora Gutiérrez, MD, PhD, is a Consultant in Nephrology (Innovation and Research Coordinator) at the Clínica Universidad de Navarra. He received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award for research on biomolecular and imaging markers and the 2023 Young Investigators Award for a project on the development of a molecular fingerprint based on extracellular vesicles in type 2 diabetes. Dr Mora chairs the Renal-MRI network for innovation in bioimaging and leads the CARTNEL Advanced Cell Therapy Consortium for Autoimmune Diseases. He holds theology and moral theology degrees and is pursuing a second PhD on bioethics in CKD.

Danielle Haslam is a nutritional and molecular epidemiologist leveraging diet and omics data form large prospective cohort studies and complementary randomized controlled trials to identify dietary biomarkers and understand molecular mechanisms contributing to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes risk. Dr. Haslam was recently awarded a K01 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to support her ongoing research focused on understanding the biological mechanisms underlying the effects of sugar and artificially sweetened beverages on health to inform personalized dietary recommendations.

Steven B. Heymsfield, M.D. is Professor and former Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dr. Heymsfield’s research interests cover topics including obesity, malnutrition, cancer, body composition, and caloric expenditure. His contributions to human nutrition research led to the TOPS Award from The Obesity Society (TOS), Rhoads Award from the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN), Robert H. Herman Memorial Award, American Society of Nutrition (ASN), and George Bray Founders Award from TOS. Dr. Heymsfield is past president of ASPEN, ASN and TOS. He was appointed an Amazon Scholar in 2021.

Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD, is the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His major research interests include epidemiology and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions and risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes; nutritional metabolomics in type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease; and nutrition transition, metabolic phenotypes, and cardiovascular disease in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Hu serves as Director of Dietary Biomarker Development Center and Co-director of Obesity Epidemiology and Prevention Program at Harvard. Dr. Hu is the recipient of the Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology by the American Diabetes Association in 2010. He was named the American Heart Association’ Ancel Keys Memorial Lecturer in 2018. He has published a textbook on Obesity Epidemiology (Oxford University Press) and >1500 peer-reviewed papers with an H-index of 318. Dr. Hu served on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, USDA/HHS. He has served on the editorial/advisory board of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Diabetes Care, and Clinical Chemistry. Dr. Hu a member of National Academy of Medicine.

Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics and Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Harvard Chan Microbiome in Public Health Center. He is an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. His lab focuses on methods for functional analysis of microbial communities, molecular epidemiology of the human microbiome, and its potential as a diagnostic tool and point of therapeutic intervention.

David Kerr MBChB, DM, FRCP, FRCPE, a UK trained endocrinologist is currently Senior Investigator in Diabetes and Digital health Equity at the Sutter Health Center for Health Systems Research in Santa Barbara, California (https://www.davidkerrmd.com/). David’s recent research has focused on offering wearable digital health technologies such as continuous glucose monitors to marginalized and historically excluded communities to help understand the potential value of real time physiological data. He has published more than 400 articles, commentaries and opinion pieces as well as co-authoring the first three books focusing on diabetes and digital health. David also has an adjunct position in the Dept of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Rice University in Houston Texas. You can follow David on ‘X’ at @godiabetesmd.

Professor Rikard Landberg is head of the Department of Food and Nutrition Science at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden (n=50). Landberg’s multidisciplinary group (n=20) investigates the preventive role of (plant-based) foods through observational and interventional studies. Landberg is PI of several RCTs on the role of plant foods in appetite and weight regulation and on cardiometabolic risk. To date, the team has conducted about 15 studies involving more than 1500 participants, ranging from small acute meal studies and pharmacokinetic studies to investigate the basic mechanisms of specific dietary components on human physiology, to large long-term randomized controlled trials to support EU health claims. Landberg is also leading studies to test novel OMICs-based personalized approaches for improved cardiometabolic disease prevention. In his group, metabolomics is a key technique used for discovery and validation of exposure and prediction biomarkers and for molecular phenotyping as a basis for tailored dietary strategies for personalized nutrition. Novel food intake biomarkers for whole grain intake, fish, coffee and dietary patterns have emerged and have been widely validated and implemented by the international research community. The Landberg group uses well-established cohorts from Sweden (SIMPLER, Northern Disease and Health Study), Denmark (Danish Diet Cancer and Health – Next Generation cohort) and Europe (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition). Professor Landberg has authored ~230 papers, ~10 book chapters, ~40 invited/keynote lectures and is the editor of one book. He has a Scopus H-index of 45. Professor Landberg is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the National Committee for Nutrition and Food Science of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Young Academy of Sweden (2018-2023).

J. Alfredo Martínez NutrPhD, BPharm and MD. Precision Nutrition Program at IMDEA-Alimentación Director. He has participated in several hallmark nutritional trials (DIOGENES, SEAFOODplus, NUGENOB, FOOD4ME, STOP, PREVIEW and SWEET), and in national consortia (PREDIMED and CIBERobn), whose results and conceptual contributions have been published in the most relevant medical and scientific journals, with more than 35,000 citations. He has supervised >90 doctoral theses and has published >950 articles in the areas of Obesity, Nutrition and Nutritional Epidemiology, including precision nutritional omics (H-Factor>115). President (2019-2024) of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS). Holder of various international recognition.

Associate Professor Jordi Merino is a molecular epidemiologist with specific training and expertise in nutrition, metabolism, and genomics. He obtained his PhD in atherosclerosis and lipid metabolism at Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, and completed postdoctoral training in genetic epidemiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. Jordi Merino leads the genomics and precision medicine research group at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen. The group focuses on understanding the molecular heterogeneity that characterises diabetes. Using advanced techniques like multi-omics profiling, wearable devices, and bioinformatic approaches, his team refines strategies for diabetes prevention and care, advancing the field of precision medicine for cardiometabolic diseases.

Antonio Paoli is a Full Professor of Exercise and Sports Sciences and Director of the Nutrition & Exercise Physiology Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Padua, Italy. He also serves as Director and Professor of Strength Training and Sport Nutrition at UCAM University (Murcia, Spain). Since 2021, he has held the position of Vice Rector for Wellness and Sport at the University of Padua. His research focuses on the ketogenic diet, fasting, the interaction between exercise and diet, and the molecular mechanisms underlying exercise training adaptations.

Dr. Courtney Peterson is an Associate Professor in Nutrition Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an internationally-recognized researcher in the field of intermittent fasting and meal timing. Dr. Peterson conducted the first controlled feeding trial of intermittent fasting and the first trial of early time-restricted eating (TRE). Her research has shown that TRE can induce weight loss, alter appetite hormones, improve glycemic control, lower blood pressure, decrease oxidative stress, increase autophagy, and improve metabolic flexibility. Currently, she is the PI or site PI of seven trials on TRE, including some of the largest trials of intermittent fasting.

Dr. Miguel Ruiz-Canela is a Professor and Chair at the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Navarra, Spain. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Navarra and earned a Master’s degree in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on the association between diet, cooking habits, and cardiometabolic health. He serves as co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of an NIH-funded project on lifestyle interventions, metabolomics, the microbiome, and diabetes. Additionally, he is co-PI of the PREDIMAR trial, which investigates the Mediterranean diet’s role in the secondary prevention of atrial fibrillation, and is actively involved in various studies, including the SUN cohort and the PREDIMED-Plus trial.

Jordi Salas-Salvadó is professor and director of the Human Nutrition Unit -Rovira i Virgili University-(Spain), and ICREA Academia Investigator. CIBERobn PI and coordinator of its Nutrition Program, and Director of the Centre Català de la Nutrició. His research has focused on clinical trials in humans evaluating the effect of food and dietary patterns on obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. He is one of the PREDIMED study leaders, and PI and Chairman of the steering committee of PREDIMED-Plus, two large clinical trials for the primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. The group has developed skills in precision medicine using different OMIC methodologies that are implemented in epidemiological and clinical studies.

Iris Shai is a Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Ben-Gurion University, an Adjunct Professor at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at Leipzig University, Germany. Her research focuses on precision nutrition, exploring its impact on aging, cardiometabolic health, body fat composition, cognition, epigenetics, and microbiome. She is the Primary Investigator of significant long-term, large-scale dietary randomized controlled trials, including DIRECT, CASCADE, CENTRAL, DIRECT PLUS, and the Follow-Intervention-Trials (FIT) cohort. Shai teaches the course “Precision Nutrition: Dietary Intervention Studies and Nutrition Omics” at Harvard.

As a pioneer of Precision Medicine, Dr Michael Snyder has invented many technologies enabling the 21st century of healthcare including systems biology, RNA sequencing, and protein chip. Dr Snyder has initiated the Big Data approach to healthcare through his work using omics to detect early stage disease, including wearables to detect infectious diseases like COVID-19, and at-home microsampling to measure hundreds of molecules from a single drop of blood. He is the first researcher to gather petabytes of data on individuals, which is 1 Million – 1 trillion times more data than the average clinician collects. He as published over 900 papers and is one of the most cited scientists. In terms of commercial success, Mike has co-founded 17 companies (including 2 unicorns) with combined enterprise value of over $6 billion.

Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, MBA, MACP, FAAP, FAHA, FAMWA, FTOS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and a pioneering obesity medicine physician. She is highly cited in her field, having over 200 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Stanford holds a BS and MPH from Emory University, an MD from the Medical College of Georgia, an MPA from Harvard, and an executive MBA from the Quantic School. Her training includes an Obesity Medicine & Nutrition Fellowship at MGH/HMS. She has earned numerous accolades, including the AMA Inspirational Physician Award, the HMS Amos Diversity Award, and The Obesity Society Clinician of the Year. In 2022, she was named a Scholar in Diagnostic Excellence by the National Academy of Medicine and appointed to the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Dr. Qi Sun is Associate Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sun’s primary research interests are to examine biomedical risk factors, particularly dietary biomarkers, in relation to diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. His research is primarily based on the Nurses’ Health Studies and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. His research has led to more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Sun is currently leading a few NIH-funded projects that focus on food biomarker discovery and validation, human gut microbiome and plasma metabolome, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in human populations.

Diana M. Thomas received her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996. She is currently a professor of mathematical sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Dr. Thomas has been an active research mathematician for over 30 years with a focus on nutrition and obesity related modeling. She has worked with large complex and high dimensional datasets and co-invented the remote weight loss program, SmartLoss™, which has been clinically applied world-wide to guide and improve individual patient weight loss adherence through smartphone technology. She is an associate editor for the world’s top ranked journal for original research in nutrition, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and co-edits the series “Best (but oft-forgotten) practices”, which consists of methodologic commentaries or statistical tutorials. Dr. Thomas is currently the PI of the Artificial Intelligence, Data Engineering & Machine Learning (AIDE-ML) Center for the Nutrition for Precision Health Consortium which she also served as a co-chair for the Steering Committee. Dr. Thomas holds the 2012 Mathematical Association of American of NJ Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2015 Obesity Society George Bray Founder’s Award, and the 2023 American Mathematical Society Mary P. Dolciani Prize for Excellence in Research.

Dr. Estefania Toledo is Full Professor and Deputy Chair at the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Navarra. She received her MD and PhD at the University of Navarra and her MPH at the Spanish National School of Health. Her research has focused on the association between lifestyle factors -mainly dietary factors- on chronic diseases, especially on cardiovascular disease and cancer. Since 2006 she has actively participated in the SUN Project, in the PREDIMED trial and currently also in the PREDIMED-Plus trial and the LifeBreast trial. A full list of publications can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1fYkDuD8TjCQn/bibliography/public/

Stine Marie Ulven is professor in nutrition and Head of Department of Nutrition, University of Oslo. The main aim of her research group is to get a comprehensive understanding of the role of diet and in particular dietary fat on biological processes in humans by applying transcriptomics and metabolomics in dietary intervention studies. The ultimate goal is to integrate large-scale datasets to identify molecular profiles or metabotypes to explain why people respond differently to diet. She is currently coordinating an EU funded MSCA Doctoral Network called NUTRIOME aiming to train 10 PhD students in data-driven precision nutrition, to handle and combine multi-omics data, to evaluate the response to foods and design precision nutrition intervention studies.

Dr. Walter Willett is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and served as Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard for 25 years. Much of his work has focused on the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases among nearly 300,000 men and women who he has followed for up to 40 years. He has published over 2,000 research papers and has written the textbook, Nutritional Epidemiology, and four books for the general public. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Clemens Wittenbecher specializes in multi-omics multi-study data integration to uncover the relationship between dietary patterns and the risk of cardiometabolic diseases. His expertise lies in data-driven network analyses, risk prediction, machine learning, and causal modeling techniques, applied to both prospective cohorts and dietary intervention studies. Through his research, Clemens aims to reinforce the evidence supporting the causal impact of dietary composition on cardiometabolic disease development and to pioneer biomarkers for disease subtyping and precision nutrition strategies. He is an Assistant Professor in precision medicine and diagnostics at Chalmers University of Technology and Wallenberg Data-Driven Life Science Fellow in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Ming Yang completed his PhD and Postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. During his PhD, he did a secondment at Science magazine and Science Translational Medicine. Ming was an editor in BMC Medicine in 2020 before joining Nature Medicine in March 2022, handling research in nutrition, non-communicable diseases and public health.