Profile in English

Academic degrees

• MSc in Nutritional Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 2009

• PhD, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, 2014. Title: Dietary factors, obesity and serum lipoprotein profile: A nutritional epidemiological study in young adult twins
• Docent in Nutritional Epidemiology, University of Helsinki, 2018

Research interests

My research has spanned across several areas of (nutritional) epidemiological research, including dietary assessment methodology, family studies (including twin research), determinants of child and adolescent nutrition and lifestyle and possible causes and consequences of obesity and related metabolic disorders. I moved to Bremen in 2017 to work at the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology in order to analyse data from the multi-centre pan-European IDEFICS/I. Family cohort study. During the last years, I made several research visits to Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg. Funded by the Lise Meitner Programme of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, I started at the Department of Epidemiology at the Medical University of Vienna In April 2019. During this project, I will examine the associations between maternal diet (in particular, diet quality and the intake of B-Vitamins) during pregnancy and the long-term risk of overweight and obesity in their offspring. For this purpose, I will utilize over 2000 mother-child pairs from two large, well-known U.S. studies, the “Nurse Health Study II” and the children enrolled in the offspring cohort named “Growing Up Today Study”.

Selected research topics

• Dietary assessment methodology and dietary pattern analysis

• Social influences on eating behaviour

• Genetic susceptibility to obesity

• Life course perspective on chronic disease epidemiology

• Meal timing and insulin sensitivity

Other affiliations

Visiting researcher, Institute of Molecular Medicine FIMM, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland