Lauren O’Connor is a nutrition scientist and epidemiologist who has over a decade of experience investigating how certain foods and dietary patterns affect cardiometabolic health and risk for obesity-related chronic diseases. A methodologist at heart, she has expertise in the design and conduct of randomized controlled feeding trials, dietary assessment and measurement error methodologies, national nutrition surveillance (NHANES) and US dietary databases, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses. She currently serves as the chair-elect for the American Society for Nutrition (ASN)’s Climate/Environment, Health, Agriculture, and Improved Nutrition (CHAIN) Research Interest Group; the Awards Chair and Mentorship Program lead for ASN’s Early Career Membership Group; a member of the FASEB Early Career Representative Engagement Task Force; and is on the Editorial Board for Frontiers in Nutrition’s Nutrition Methodology Section.

Prior to her time at the Evidence Center, she was a Principal Investigator at the USDA’s Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center where she also contributed to the systematic reviews for the Dietary Reference Intakes for fat and carbohydrates. She was a Cancer Prevention Research Fellow at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI) where she served on the Data Analysis Team for the 2020-25 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and played an integral role in advancements for NCI’s Automated Self-Administered 24-Hour (ASA24®) Dietary Assessment Tool, including development of the Respondent Nutrition Report and the Sleep Module. During her fellowship at NCI, she completed an MPH at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistical methods. She obtained her PhD in Nutrition Science from Purdue University as well as her dual BS in Dietetics and Nutrition, Fitness, and Health.

Email: lauren.oconnor@ag.tamu.edu