2026
July 25-28, 2026 – Matthew Darmadi and Ashley Weeks, two medical students who are a part of our group, joined Dr. Wood at ASN’s NUTRITION 2026 Conference this year! Ashley gave a poster presentation demonstrating the positive effects of fruit intake on diabetes risk over time, and Matthew gave an oral presentation on the effects of unprocessed red meat on lowering diabetes risk. Well done, Ashley and Matthew!
July 14, 2026 - Dr. Wood flew to London, England (where she was born!) to present her findings suggesting that long-term remodeling of the proteome over more than a decade precedes the onset of cognitive decline at the 2026 Alzheimer's Association International Conference.
July 13, 2026 - Welcome (back) to our team, Dr. Senn! From 2017-2020, Mackenzie Senn joined our team as a graduate student while earning her MPH. We are happy to announce that she has joined our team once more, as Dr. Senn, after recently earning a Ph.D. in Epidemiology! We are delighted she chose to start this next phase in her career with our team as a Research Associate.
July 10, 2026 - Congratulations to our research coordinator, Tomi, for being accepted into medical school! She will be starting this August, and we are quite sad to see her go! We are so grateful for everything she did for the MIND: Toddlers Study and wish her the best with her future endeavors!
July 5, 2026 - Happy birthday to our amazing PI, Dr. Wood! We are so excited for you to spend your birthday back in England with your family.
June 29, 2026 - Jacob Schneider joins us as our team’s lead biostatistician after completing his post-baccalaureate fellowship at NIH. Jacob is joining to learn more about workflows for high-dimensional data analysis and will be working on projects as diverse as metabolites associated with dietary intake in toddlers and proteins associated with cognitive decline in dementia patients. Welcome to the Wood Lab, Jacob!
June 20, 2026 - Welcome to the Wood Lab, Granger! Granger is a Rice University undergraduate student who just joined our team for a summer internship where she will work on identifying how metabolomic changes over time predict MRI measures related to Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. We are excited you have joined our team!
May 29, 2026 - Happy birthday to our research intern, Tobias!
April 18, 2026 - Happy birthday to our lab admin and research coordinator, Dani!
March 17, 2026 - Dr. Wood flew to Boston to meet with other TOPMed investigators working on data from the MESA study. She gave two presentations to the investigator team, each showcasing a different technique for analyzing longitudinal multi-omics data.
March 10, 2026 - Our research intern, Tobias Kornfein, was accepted into BCM’s SMART program! The SMART program is a competitive program for undergraduates that gives opportunity for close mentorship and the chance to work on a “real-world” biomedical problem over the summer. Congratulations, Tobias! We can’t wait to see what knowledge your project uncovers.
Feb. 2, 2026 - We are delighted to share a new funded project in partnership with The Peanut Institute and the USDA/ARS. Our Metabolomic Investigation of Nutrition and Development in Adolescents (MIND-Adolescents; a partner study to MIND-Toddlers) study will combine metabolomics with (1) a feeding challenge, in order to develop a valid and reproducible plasma marker of peanut intake; and (2) a randomized control trial designed to test the effects of increasing peanut consumption on sleep and cognitive development in adolescents. Dr. Wood and Dr. Jenny Moreno, who leads the Moreno lab, are co-PIs on this exciting project.
2025
Nov. 1, 2025 – Dr. Wood, our lab’s PI, and other CNRC faculty had a great time speaking at Sigma Xi’s iFORE 2025 Conference!
Dr. Wood and her CNRC colleagues, who come from a variety of research backgrounds, spoke about their goal to leverage the social ecological model to develop effective, sustainable solutions for improving diet quality among US children.
Specifically, Dr. Wood discussed her research on how precision nutrition tailors dietary intake to most benefit a person’s health. Dr. Sheryl Hughes spoke about her research on the role of family in child eating behaviors, and Dr. Jayna Dave on her research about the importance of the broader community in children’s health. Dr. Stephanie Sisley gave her perspective as a pediatric endocrinologist on the importance of tying all these influences together in clinical practice.
Oct. 27, 2025 – Welcome to our team, Ms. Sandra Yun! Sandra recently moved to Houston from San Diego, where she spent 5 years as an epidemiologist for the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Department. Sandra joins our growing data science team and its work developing and applying rigorous, reproducible workflows for large-scale analyses of the proteome and metabolome, as it relates to nutrition and health across the lifespan.
Oct. 3, 2025 – We were delighted that our collaborator, Jiantao Ma, had his R01 proposal “Multiethnic and multiomics analysis of longitudinal changes in DNA methylation and Cardiovascular health”, funded! The American Heart Association’s “Life’s Essential 8” provides a checklist of eight key measures for improving and maintaining cardiovascular health. We will collaborate on Dr. Ma’s project to identify areas of the genome where gene expression (the “turning off and on” of genes) responds to the lifestyle changes advised in the Life’s Essential 8 checklist, to better understand why this advice helps preserve heart health as we age. Congratulations to Dr. Ma!
Oct. 1, 2025 – Our collaborative paper “Sleep-disordered breathing subtypes and future diet quality in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis” was published in the journal Sleep Health. Thank you to Dr. Kaitlin Potts at Brigham and Women’s & Harvard Medical School for your leadership on this project!
Oct. 1, 2025 – Our abstract entitled “Leveraging Longitudinal ‘Omics Data to Improve Our Understanding of the Effects of Diet on Health: The Example of Red Meat”, was one of the top-rated abstract submissions, and won a conference award for the upcoming Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research (CHARGE) International Conference. Dr. Alexis Wood is excited to present our work shedding new light on how red meat relates to health at the CHARGE conference in North Carolina this December.
Sept. 19, 2025 – Dr. Wood loved speaking to parents of toddlers at West University Branch Library’s "Play, Grow, & Learn" Workshop about the importance of good nutrition in the early years. Thank you to all the wonderful participants for your engagement and interest and to all the children who played games with Dr. Wood!
Sept. 18, 2025 – Dr. Wood was selected to receive the 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Recognition award by the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, for her service reviewing manuscript submissions this past year. Congratulations!
Sept. 17, 2025 – Happy birthday to Martin Chen, our biostatistician!
Aug. 25, 2025 – Tobias Kornfein, a Rice Undergraduate, started his second internship with our group. Tobias will be continuing his work using large-scale metabolomic data from the TEDDY study to identify which foods might support cognitive development during toddlerhood. Welcome back, Tobias – we are so glad you are sticking with our team!