.jpg "Katherine L. Tucker, PhD photo")
Professor, Director of the Center for Population Health
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences
Katherine L. Tucker, Ph.D. holds the title of Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences, and is the Director of the Center for Population Health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, with an adjunct appointment at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She has held previous positions at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center for Aging at Tufts University and McGill University. She received her PhD from Cornell University and her undergraduate degree from the University of Connecticut, both in nutritional sciences. Dr. Tucker has contributed to more than 500 articles in scientific journals. Her research focuses on dietary intake and risk of chronic disease, including osteoporosis, cognitive decline, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease, with an emphasis on health disparities. She is the PI of the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study, an ongoing cohort study, to examine the roles of diet, health behaviors, stress, and genetic predisposition on chronic health conditions. She serves as a scientific adviser for the Jackson Heart Study, an NHLBI cohort of African American adults. She is a Fellow of the ASN as well as the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and the Gerontological Society of America. She has previously served on the National Academy of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board (2014-20) and as the Editor-in-Chief of Advances in Nutrition (2013-23), and is currently the senior editor of the forthcoming 12th edition of the textbook Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease.