Assistant Professor, Nutrition
Building an interdisciplinary research program that intersects nutrition, metabolism, and reproductive physiology and is guided by the overarching aim: to detect, understand, and prevent the integrative mechanisms responsible for aberrant reproductive development during the adolescent reproductive transition. The Vanden Brink Lab studies how polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) can manifest during adolescence and the role of diet and living with obesity in their capacity to disrupt reproductive maturation in the later pubertal stages, leading to PCOS. The goals of our lab are to define the role of precision nutrition for optimal adolescent reproductive maturation, establish early biomarkers of reproductive axis miscalibration before conditions such as PCOS manifest, and identify targeted interventions for PCOS prevention.