Continuous Update Project Expert Panel

Professor Alan Jackson

Professor of Human Nutrition and Director, Institute of Human Nutrition, University of Southampton; 
Director of National Institute of Health Research at Southampton Biomedical Research Centre for Nutrition, Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust

Alan Jackson was appointed Professor of Human Nutrition in the University of Southampton in 1985: the first Chair in the discipline in an undergraduate medical school in the UK. He is Director of the National Institute of Health Research Southampton Biomedical Centre in Nutrition.

He trained in paediatrics at the University of Cambridge and University College Hospital London. He was a Wellcome Research Fellow and subsequently Director of the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, where he helped develop the evidence base for the World Health Organization’s manual on effective treatment of severe malnutrition. He was foundation Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition to the Departments of Health and Food Standards Agency and a member of the nutrition panel of the European Food Safety Authority.

He is currently President of the Association for Nutrition, a Council Member of the Caribbean Health Research Council, and convenor for the International Malnutrition Task Force.

Professor Jackson is the Chair of the Continuous Update Project Panel and was also a member of the Expert Panel for our 2007 Second Expert Report.

Professor Hilary Powers

Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry, Human Nutrition Unit, Department of Oncology, University of Sheffield

Hilary Powers is Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at the University of Sheffield. She completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and continued her research career at the MRC’s Dunn Nutrition Laboratory in Cambridge. She left Cambridge to help establish the Human Nutrition Unit at Sheffield University in 1989. She became Head of this Unit in 2000 and was awarded a chair in nutritional biochemistry in 2004.

Professor Powers is a member of the Department of Health (DoH) Project Board for the National Diet and Nutrition Surveys of the UK population. She also sits on the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition and is Chair of the DoH working group reviewing the vitamin D requirements of the UK population.

Her research is concerned with the mechanisms for involvement of B vitamins in the pathophysiology of disease, including cancer, and in the development of functional biomarkers of micronutrient status. Her research is supported by the BBSRC, WCRF and DoH.

Professor Powers was also on the Expert Panel for the 2007 Second Expert Report.

Dr Elisa Bandera

Professor and Chief, Cancer Epidemiology and Health Outcomes and Co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers School of Public Health

Elisa Bandera is Professor and Chief, Cancer Epidemiology and Health Outcomes and Co-Leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, a Professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Department of Medicine and Rutgers School of Public Health, and a member of the graduate faculty at Rutgers University’s Department of Nutritional Sciences.

She earned an MD degree from the University of Málaga, Spain, and a PhD in Epidemiology and Community Health from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she also completed post-doctoral training in nutritional epidemiology of cancer. Her major research interests include the impact of dietary factors and obesity on female hormonal cancer risk and survival, early determinants of cancer risk, and breast cancer in African American women. She has served as Principal Investigator in several epidemiologic studies, including the New Jersey Ovarian Cancer Study, which is a member of the Ovarian Cancer Association International Consortium, the Jersey Girl Study (a study evaluating factors affecting puberty in girls), the Women’s Circle of Health Study (a study of breast cancer in African American women, which is a member of the AMBER Consortium), and KP-ROCS (a cohort study evaluating obesity and ovarian cancer survival).

Over the past ten years, she has been actively involved in translating research findings into public health recommendations. She was involved in the development of the American Cancer Society’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Guidelines for Cancer Prevention in 2006 and in the 2011 Guidelines for Cancer Prevention and Survival.

Dr Bandera was also involved in the development of the 2007 Second Expert Report.

Dr Steven Clinton

Professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology, The Ohio State University

Steven Clinton is a Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at The Ohio State University. He trained for his MD and PhD at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign followed by Internal Medicine internship and residency at the University of Chicago. He proceeded with Medical Oncology training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School where he remained on faculty for nearly a decade.

At The Ohio State University he serves as Director of the Prostate and Genitourinary Oncology Program for The James Cancer Hospital. Dr Clinton also leads the Molecular Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention Program for the Comprehensive Cancer Center and is co-director of the campus wide Food Innovation Center.

Dr Clinton’s research activities, described in over 200 publications, include epidemiology, clinical intervention trials, as well as basic laboratory studies of cellular and molecular biology relevant to many aspects of diet, nutrition, and cancer. He provides service to many national organisations including the American Institute for Cancer Research.

He served as a member of the CUP Mechanisms Protocol Development Group and continues to have an advisory role to this work.

Dr Edward Giovanucci

Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology, Department of Nutrition and Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health

Edward Giovannucci is a Professor in the Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received a medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1984, and did his residency in anatomic pathology at the University of Connecticut. He received a doctoral degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1992.

His research focuses on how nutritional, environmental and lifestyle factors relate to various malignancies, especially those of the prostate and colorectum. A specific area of interest is the aetiologic mechanisms underlying the relation between these modifiable factors and cancer risk. His work has included the study of how nutrition and other lifestyle factors impact on cancer risk by influencing levels of insulin, insulin-like growth factors, vitamin D metabolites, and steroid hormones.

Recent publications include investigations of the role of vitamin D levels in myocardial infarction and in the survival of patients with colorectal cancer. Another area of interest is how nutrients may interact with genetic susceptibilities in determining an individual’s risk.

Dr Steven Hursting

Professor, Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health

Stephen Hursting is Professor of Nutrition at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. He earned a BA in Biology from Earlham College and a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry and an MPH in Nutritional Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina. He also completed postdoctoral training in Molecular Biology and Cancer Prevention, as a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

From 1995 to 1999, Dr Hursting was an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Carcinogenesis at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer, where he directed a multidisciplinary research program in nutrition and cancer prevention. He continues his affiliation with his former departments at the MD Anderson Cancer Center as a Professor of Carcinogenesis and Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology.

From 1999–2005, he was Deputy Director of the NCI’s Office of Preventive Oncology, Division of Cancer Prevention. He was responsible for all aspects of the NCI’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program. Dr Hursting was also an Investigator in the NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, where he was Chief of the Nutrition and Molecular Carcinogenesis Section of the NCI’s Laboratory of Biosystems and Cancer. His research programme focuses on the nutritional modulation of the carcinogenesis process, with a particular emphasis on the molecular, cellular and hormonal changes underlying important nutrition and cancer associations, with a focus on energy balance/obesity.

From 2005–14, he was Professor and Margaret McKean Love Chair in Nutrition, Cellular and Molecular Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, and Professor of Carcinogenesis, UT-MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr Hursting was also involved in the development of the 2007 Second Expert Report and was Chair of the CUP’s Mechanisms Protocol Development Group (MPDG).

Professor Michael F Leitzmann

Head, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Regensburg University, Germany

Michael Leitzmann is chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He holds an MD from the University of Berlin and a MPH in quantitative methods and a doctorate in public health from Harvard University.

His main research interests involve the independent and joint relations of physical activity, body size, and diet to the development and prognosis of chronic disease, particularly cancer. This includes methodological research on the assessment of physical activity and its individual components in large-scale epidemiologic studies and clarification of biologic mechanisms linking the adverse effects of physical inactivity and adiposity to cancer risk and prognosis.

Prior to his appointment at Regensburg University, he was an investigator at the Nutritional Epidemiology Branch of the US National Cancer Institute, where he served as co-principal investigator of the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, a prospective cohort of over 500,000 US women and men. He holds a group award of merit for exemplary leadership in advancing the US National Cancer Institute’s commitment to understanding the science of energy balance and cancer and applying that understanding to reduce the cancer burden.

Dr Anne McTiernan

Research Professor, Epidemiology 
Adjunct Research Professor (Division of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine) and
 Adjunct Research Professor (Medicine), Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Washington

Anne McTiernan is a member of the Cancer Prevention Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where she is Director of the Prevention Center. She is also Research Professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine Department of Epidemiology, and School of Medicine Division of Geriatrics.

Dr McTiernan holds an MD in Maternal Medicine from the New York Medical College, a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington, and in Sociology from Boston University. Her research focuses on identifying ways to prevent new or recurrent breast cancer through physical activity, weight control, and medical therapies.

Dr McTiernan is the principal investigator of several National Cancer Institute-funded clinical trials and observational studies testing the effect of exercise, diet, weight, and medications on risk of breast and other cancers.

She has played a leadership role on international committees providing guidelines for cancer prevention, including the International Agency for Cancer Research and the American Cancer Society. She was a member of the 2008 US Department of Health and Human Services Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Since 2010 she has been a Komen Scholar, and in 2012 she received a Citation Award from the American College of Sports Medicine for her research contributions on physical activity and health.

Professor Inger Thune

Senior Consultant Oncology, Oslo University Hospital
; Professor in Cancer Epidemiology, University of Tromso, Norway

Inger Thune is Senior consultant in oncology at the Oslo University Hospital, The Cancer Center. She is a valued member of the Breast Oncology Group. At the same time she has had research appointments as a Professor at the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø. She is chair of the Norwegian TREC (Translational Research Energetics and Cancer) Research Group, at the Oslo University Hospital.

Dr Thune is a pioneer in the research field dealing with energy balance and cancer. Especially she has concentrated on physical activity. She has mostly been working breast cancer but also with colorectal cancer. She has been performing large cohort studies and been active in method evaluations. She is involved in research concerning biological mechanisms in breast cancer. Her research is supported by the Norwegian Breast Cancer Group.

Professor Ricardo Uauy

Professor of Human Nutrition, Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology, University of Chile; 
Professor Public Health Nutrition, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London

Ricardo Uauy holds the position of Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the Institute of Nutrition (INTA) University of Chile and in London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He received his MD from the University of Chile in 1972, and his PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from MIT in 1977. He has trained in Pediatrics and Clinical Nutrition and is Board Certified in Pediatrics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine (US).

Professor Uauy was president of the IUNS from 2005-09. He has participated as an expert in multiple WHO/FAO expert committees: in 2002 Member (Chairperson) of the WHO/FAO expert consultation on Diet and Nutrition Prevention of Chronic Diseases and Global Strategy WHO/03; in 2005 Member WHO expert consultation on Prevention and Control of Childhood Obesity; in 2006 Member WHO expert panel for Scientific Update on Carbohydrates in Human Health/Disease; in 2007 Member (Chairperson) of the WHO expert panel for Scientific Update on Trans Fatty Acids; in 2010 Member (Chairperson) FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Fats and Fatty Acids in Human Health.

Professor Uauy has also received many awards, most notably PAHO’s Abraham Horwitz award for Leadership in Interamerican Health 2005 and the National Applied Science award given by the government of Chile 2012. He has published over 300 peer reviewed indexed papers and edited 10 books.

Professor Uauy was also a member of the Expert Panel for the 2007 Second Expert Report.

Professor Elio Riboli

Professor in Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention
; Director, Imperial School of Public Health, Imperial College London

Elio Riboli is Director of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London. He holds an MD degree (1977, State University of Milan), an MPH (1980, Milan) and a MSc in Epidemiology (1982, Harvard University).

Professor Riboli is an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians (2008) and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. From 1983 to 2005 Professor Riboli was based at Lyon’s the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), where he developed new research projects in the areas of diet, nutritional status and cancer. In 1990 he initiated the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), which sampled data from 520,000 subjects across 23 centres in ten countries. He was Head of the Nutrition and Hormones Group of IARC from 2004 to 2005.

Professor Riboli has co-authored over 580 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 book chapters and books. His major areas of research are the role of metabolic factors, including different metabolic syndrome components and nutritional status in cancer causation and prevention.

In 2005, he joined ICL as Professor of Cancer Epidemiology; in 2006 he was appointed Divisional Head of Epidemiology, Public Health and Primary Care, and became the first Director when the School of Public Health was established in January 2010.

Professor Riboli participated as IARC-WHO observer to the Expert Panel of the First Expert Report, and was on the Expert Panel for the Second Expert Report.

Dr Marc Gunter

Marc Gunter is Head of the Section of Nutrition and Metabolism at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the specialised cancer research agency of the World Health Organization.

Dr Gunter holds a PhD in molecular epidemiology from the University of Cambridge and a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford. He completed his postdoctoral training at the US National Cancer Institute and has held faculty positions at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and Imperial College London. His research focuses on the role of nutrition and obesity in the natural history of cancer with an emphasis on metabolic dysfunction and in particular the insulin/IGF/mTOR pathway.

Dr Gunter is principal investigator of a number of studies applying high dimensional metabolic profiling within the framework of large prospective and clinical cohorts to identify novel biochemical pathways involved in cancer development and prognosis. Recent publications include investigations of obesity subtypes defined by metabolic measurements in relation to breast and colorectal cancer risk, adipose tissue-derived factors and breast cancer and the role of endogenous estrogens in colorectal cancer development.