Lauren O’Connor, PhD, MPH

Lauren O’Connor, PhD, MPH, is the nutrition and health program lead at the Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Evidence Center, where she leads a team of nutrition scientists, epidemiologists, and mathematicians to conduct evidence synthesis projects to inform public health initiatives. O’Connor is a nutrition scientist, epidemiologist, and a methodologist at heart, with expertise in the design and conduct of randomized controlled feeding trials, dietary assessment, national nutrition surveillance and U.S. dietary databases, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Prior to her role at the Evidence Center, O’Connor was a researcher at the USDA’s Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center where her research focused on improving intake assessments of processed foods, red meat, and dietary patterns to better understand effects on obesity-related chronic diseases. While at USDA, she also contributed to the systematic reviews for the Dietary Reference Intakes for fat and carbohydrates. As a Cancer Prevention Research Fellow and Research Affiliate at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), she served on the Data Analysis Team for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 and worked on advancements for NCI’s Automated Self-Administered 24-Hour (ASA24®) Dietary Assessment Tool.

O’Connor earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Nutrition Science with a concentration in human clinical nutrition and ingestive behavior from Purdue University, a Master of Public Health with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University, and a dual Bachelor of Science in Dietetics and Nutrition, Fitness, and Health from Purdue University.