Funding Partners & Collaborators
Dr Claire McEvoy, Project Co-ordinator, Queen's University Belfast
As a dietitian and epidemiologist, I investigate the role of nutrition in healthy ageing and prevention of disease. My research spans two main areas: (1) Examination of dietary and other modifiable factors in relation to disease risk in cohort studies (2) Development and evaluation of interventions to promote lifestyle behaviour change and improve health and well-being. Specifically, I am interested in how dietary patterns influence neurodegeneration and cardiovascular disease during ageing. A goal of my current work is to inform evidence-based dietary recommendations for dementia prevention. I am recipient of several prestigious awards including The Beeson-CARDI Career Development Fellowship (American Federation of Aging Research,) The Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Science (2016) and Alzheimer’s Society Research UK pump prime Award (2016). I am a Senior Atlantic Fellow of the Global Brain Health Institute, University of California San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin.
Dr Federica Prinelli, National Research Council
Dr Prinelli has a long-standing experience in the conceptualization and implementation of observational and intervention studies (using eHealth technologies) across the lifespan. Her research activity is mainly focused on the understanding of the clinical, socio-demographical, and behavioural determinants of complex diseases, especially metabolic, respiratory, and neurodegenerative disorders. Dr Prinelli is particularly interested in exploring the mechanisms through which lifestyles may influence health, disease risk and longevity, with a special focus on the impact of nutrition on gut microbiota and brain ageing. In her research, she integrates traditional epidemiological methods with advanced neuroimaging and -omics techniques. She has hands-on experience in the study design and research protocol definition; understanding of ethical guidelines and definition of standard operative procedures; full autonomy in collecting, monitoring and managing data, and proved skills in statistical data analysis. She also acquired specific expertise in designing and conducting internet-based surveys.
Prof Giuseppe Sergi, University of Padova
I am a MD with specializations in Geriatric Medicine and in Nutritional Sciences, PhD in Experimental and Clinical Sciences, and Associate Professor. I have thirty years of experience in Geriatric Medicine, with a consolidated expertise on the clinical management of complex older patients and a special focus on osteoporosis and energy metabolism disorders. I have been research leader of several research projects focusing in particular to the following aspects of the aging process: body composition changes and assessment methods; nutrition and energy metabolism; musculoskeletal diseases, such as sarcopenia, sarcopenic obesity, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis; dementia; and multidisciplinary approach to the geriatric patient. I am currently Principal Investigator of a National funded project focused on the gender differences in the impact of cardiovascular, osteoarticular and neurological diseases on health-related outcomes in the older population.
Prof Lorraine Brennan, University College Dublin
I am a full professor and a PI in the UCD Institute of Food & Health and Conway institute. I lead a nutritional metabolomics group that are at the forefront of the application of metabolomics in nutrition research and the development of Personalized nutrition. I was awarded an ERC consolidator grant in the field for discovery work and currently am involved in two European Consortiums- Improve and Promed-cog. My group was one the first groups to report the link between metabolomic profiles and food intake and paved the way for the development of metabolomic based biomarkers of food intake. We also develop strategies for delivering personalised nutrition.
More recently, we published an important paper demonstrating the potential of urinary based biomarkers to determine intake of certain foods- using calibration curves developed in a feeding study which enabled the estimation of intake in a cross-section population based study.
I 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. Recently, I was appointed to the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Standing Committee on Evidence Synthesis and Communications in Diet and Chronic Disease Relationships.
Prof Lisette de Groot, Wageningen University
Prof Lisette de Groot, PhD is Professor in ‘Nutrition and Aging, with due attention for older adults’ at the Wageningen University (WU). She was trained in nutrition, physiology and epidemiology and is one of the founders of the Research line on Nutrition and ageing at WU. By now she has gained over thirty years of research experience in the field of nutrition and health of elderly people, both in epidemiology and in intervention studies in old age. Her research aims to identify dietary strategies that optimize nutritional health status to slow down or reverse stages preceding aging related pathologies (cognitive decline, sarcopenia, osteoporosis) as to preserve functional health and quality of life. She was in the lead of one of the first European multicenter studies on Nutrition, health and survival (SENECA, started in 1988), to uncover healthful dietary patterns and nutritional concerns later in life. These concerns have driven subsequent interventions studies involving older adults (from healthy to care dependent), expanding the research on nutrition, health and performance from epidemiology to biology and public health. By now she has (co-)authored some 400 original, peer-reviewed research and review articles. Next to her membership of a number of international and national expert, editorial and review panels [IAG/IANA, NICHD, Active Aging, ZonMw] she is Associate editor of ‘Advances in Nutrition’ and ‘Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism’.
Prof Dorothee Volkert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Dorothee Volkert, PhD, holds the Professorship of Clinical Nutrition in Older People at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, , Institute for Biomedicine of Aging in Nuremberg, Germany, since 2009. She is a nutrition scientist and received her Ph.D. from the Geriatric Hospital Bethanien, University of Heidelberg and University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart in 1991. In 2001 she became Associate Professor at the Department of Nutrition Science, University of Bonn, and from 2005-2009 she was Head of the Department for Scientific Information in the Medical Nutrition Industry.
Her research is focused on nutritional problems of older persons in all health care settings and related interventions. She served as coordinator and first-author of the ESPEN Guidelines for Clinical Nutrition and Hydration in Geriatrics” and was/is involved in leading positions in several national and international research projcets (e.g. enable, APPETITE, MaNuEL, nutritionDay in nursing homes).