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Diane M. O'Brien, PhD

Professor
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, Alaska, United States

Dr. Diane O’Brien is Professor of Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Interim Director of the Institute of Arctic Biology. She is a nutritional physiologist with expertise in stable isotope ratios as biomarkers of diet and metabolic physiology. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 1998 and trained in stable isotope biogeochemistry as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington Geophysical Laboratory.

Her lab investigates nutritional questions in public health and ecology using stable isotope ratios. These are naturally-occurring "signatures" at the atomic level that are generated by elemental cycling in the environment. Stable isotope ratios vary in the food supply, including fish, corn-fed meats, and sugar-sweetened beverages, and thus have potential as dietary intake biomarkers. Stable isotope ratios can also be markers for nutrient sources in ecological systems. Research we do in the O'Brien lab is focused on evaluating the performance of stable isotope tools in different research contexts and pushing the boundaries of what we can infer from measuring the isotope ratios of specific molecules.

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