Cardiovascular Nutrition Team

Mission

The Cardiovascular Nutrition Team focuses on assessing the interplay between diet and heart disease risk factors. The scope of this work ranges from human intervention studies to in vitro experiments. The primary aim of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Team is to adjudicate the potential effect of dietary interventions on cardiovascular disease risk factors and expand our understanding of the underlying mechanisms with specific emphasis on post-menopausal women and older men.

Objectives

1. Determine the effect of diets differing in fat and carbohydrate type on cardiometabolic risk indicators, lipoprotein and fatty acid metabolism, response to lipid modifying therapy, and gene-nutrient interactions, using human, animal and in vitro models.
2. Determine the relationship between food preferences, consumption patterns and dietary acculturation, and cardiovascular health using population-based datasets.
3. Identify novel biomarkers for food and nutrient intake and merge them with current biomarkers for food and nutrient intake to better relate dietary patterns to cardiovascular health.

Team Members

Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc
Team Leader, Lead Scientist
Research focus: Dietary fatty acids, nutrition, lipoproteins, and cardiovascular disease risk, biomarkers of nutrient intake and disease risk, nutrition policy

Stefania Lamon-Fava, MD, PhD
Scientist I
Research Focus: Nutritional and hormonal regulation of the expression of genes involved in lipoprotein metabolism. Omega-3 fatty acids, inflammation and cardiometabolic risk.

Nirupa Matthan, PhD
Scientist I
Research Focus: Nutrition and cardiovascular disease, dietary fatty acids, cholesterol and bile acid metabolism, fatty acid and lipoprotein kinetics, sphingolipids, plant sterols, glycemic index

Jean Galluccio, Senior Research Technician
Madeline Nunes, Staff Assistant
Richard Minogue, Research Administrator I