GOBF Speakers
The Global Obesity Business Forum (GOBF)
Chapel Hill, NC
Speaker Bios and Research Areas
George A. Bray, M.D.
George A. Bray is a Boyd Professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Professor of Medicine at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. He was the first Executive Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, a post he held from 1989 to 1999.
Dr. Bray received his undergraduate education at Brown University, graduating summa cum laude before entering Harvard Medical School, where he graduated magna cum laude. Dr. Bray completed an internship on the Osler Service of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. From there he moved to become a Research Associate at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in the Laboratory of Kidney Electrolyte Metabolism at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. He completed his training in internal medicine and endocrinology at the University of Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, and Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, MA. Before moving to Louisiana, Dr. Bray was Chief of Diabetes and Clinical Nutrition at the Los Angeles County–University of Southern California Medical Center. He was Professor of Medicine and Physiology/Biophysics at the University of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles. Previously, Dr. Bray had been Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and an Assistant Physician at the New England Medical Center Hospitals also in Boston.
Dr. Bray is a member of numerous professional societies including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, the American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and the American Physiological Society. He founded the North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO) and was the founding editor of its journal, Obesity Research, as well as co-founder of the International Journal of Obesity and the first editor of Endocrine Practice, the official journal of the American College of Endocrinologists. Dr. Bray has been President of NAASO, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, the International Association for the Study of Obesity, and the American College of Endocrinology.
Dr. Bray has received many awards during his medical career, including the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, Honorary Fellow of the American Dietetic Association, Joseph Goldberger Award from the American Medical Association, the McCollum Award from the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, the Osborne-Mendel Award from the American Society of Nutritional Sciences, the TOPS Award from NAASO, the Weight Watchers Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Mead Johnson Award in Nutrition, and the Stunkard Lifetime Achievement Award. During the past 40 years, Dr. Bray has authored or coauthored more than 1,500 publications, ranging from peer-reviewed articles to reviews, books, book chapters, and abstracts.
Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D.
Cynthia M. Bulik is the William R. and Jeanne H. Jordan Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also Professor of Nutrition in the School of Public Health. She is the Director of the UNC Eating Disorders Program, the only comprehensive university-based program in the Southeast. A clinical psychologist by training, Dr. Bulik has been conducting research and treating individuals with eating disorders for the past 24 years. She received her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She completed internships and postdoctoral fellowships at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, PA. She developed outpatient, partial hospitalization, and inpatient services for eating disorders both in New Zealand and in the US. Her research has included treatment, laboratory, epidemiological, twin and molecular genetic studies of eating disorders and body weight regulation. Her research has contributed to furthering understanding of the contribution of genetic factors to conditions such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. More recently she has begun to explore innovative means of integrating technology into treatment for eating disorders and obesity in order to broaden the public health reach of interventions. She has active research collaborations throughout the United States as well as in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Austria, and Germany. Dr. Bulik has written over 300 scientific papers and chapters on eating disorders and is author of the books Eating Disorders: Detection and Treatment (Dunmore) and Runaway Eating: The 8 Point Plan to Conquer Adult Food and Weight Obsessions (Rodale), the CD-ROM EMPOWER Solution for Healthy Weight Control, and a soon-to-be-released family-based internet-delivered program on nutrition and physical activity. She is a recipient of the Eating Disorders Coalition Research Award, the Hulka Innovators Award, the Academy for Eating Disorders Leadership Award for Research, and the Carolina Women’s Center Women’s Advocacy Award. She is a past president of the Academy for Eating Disorders, Vice President of the Eating Disorders Coalition, and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Dr. Bulik holds the first endowed professorship in eating disorders in the US. To balance her life, she is a gold medalist in ice dancing and a mother of three.
Henry J. (Hank) Cardello
Henry J. (Hank) Cardello brings an extensive background in the food and beverage industry including positions as President of Sunkist Soft Drinks, Inc., Vice President of Marketing for Canada Dry, Director of Marketing for Coca-Cola USA, and Brand Manager for Anheuser-Busch and General Mills. Most recently, Mr. Cardello has served as Chief Executive Officer for several nutritional food ingredient companies. In 2000, Mr. Cardello was identified as a “Top 10 Innovator” in the Functional Foods industry. He has advised or partnered with several of the major food, beverage and nutrition corporations such as Coca-Cola, Campbell Soup, Hormel Foods, Nestlé, Pillsbury, Quaker Oats, and Tropicana.
Hank concurrently serves as Chair of the annual Global Obesity Business Forum, an initiative sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Forum brings together senior food industry executives and world renowned nutrition scientists to advance solutions regarding the obesity crisis.
Mr. Cardello is the author of Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fatto be published by HarperCollins in January, 2009. The book provides novel viewpoints regarding how to solve the obesity crisis by highlighting how various constituencies contribute to the problem and by demonstrating how the food industry can profitably improve their customer’s health.
Hank has been a featured speaker at several new business and industry forums and has served as an Executive Fellow for the American Marketing Association. He currently sits on the Board of Hormel Health Technology LLC and acts as Chairman for Source Food Technology, Inc. He has been a director for both the National Executive Committee of the Wharton Alumni Association and the Wharton Club of Atlanta. More recently, he has sat on the Boards of Legacy Securities Corporation, an investment banking firm, and the College of Business at James Madison University.
Mr. Cardello’s undergraduate degree was awarded Magna Cum Laude in materials science and metallurgy from Lehigh University, and he holds an MBA in marketing from the Wharton Graduate School, University of Pennsylvania.
K.C. Hayes, D.V.M., Ph.D.
K.C. Hayes is a Professor of Biology (Nutrition) and Director of the Foster Biomedical Research Laboratory at Brandeis University.
Dr. Hayes developed an interest in nutritional pathology as a veterinary student at Cornell University, and subsequently received his Ph.D. in that discipline from the University of Connecticut before joining the faculty in the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health for 15 years. He moved to the biology department at Brandeis University 25 years ago, where he is a Professor of Biology (Nutrition) and Director of the Brandeis animal research facility. He continues to research and teach in areas of nutrition and the pathophysiology of nutritional disease. His main area of research over the years has been on dietary fats and heart disease, including lipoprotein metabolism. He currently teaches courses in human physiology and diet and health, with current research focuses on designing dietary fats to replace trans fats and on macronutrient determinants of obesity and diabetes in animal models.
Dr. Hayes is the author or co-author of more than 190 published papers, 24 chapters, 187 abstracts, and is co-inventor on 10 patents. Several findings in his lab currently have marketplace applications, e.g., discovery of a taurine requirement for cats and infant primates led to taurine inclusion in all cat foods and human infant formulas. ALPO cat food originated from research in his lab, and currently most supermarkets in the US carry SMART BALANCE, a trans fat–free margarine designed to improve the LDL/HDL ratio. In addition, his research on enriching common foods with free phytosterols has recently found its way into everyday products in the US market.
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D
Michael F. Jacobson, who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is co-founder and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit health advocacy organization supported largely by its 900,000 members. CSPI focuses on nutrition, food safety, scientific integrity, and alcohol policy. It publishes Nutrition Action Healthletter, the largest-circulation health newsletter in the world, as well as numerous studies and reports, including "Salt: the Forgotten Killer" and "Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming Americans’ Health." CSPI is a key player in the ongoing battle to prevent diet-related chronic diseases in America and food-borne illness outbreaks. CSPI not only educates consumers, but also encourages government and corporations to take steps to protect the public’s health.
Since 1971, Jacobson and CSPI have used education, legislation, and litigation to win important reforms. CSPI led efforts to win passage of the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which requires nutrition information on most food labels, as well as a law requiring warning notices on alcohol-beverage labels and an FDA regulation requiring that trans-fat be listed on foods labels. CSPI’s studies on the nutritional quality of restaurant meals generated worldwide interest and spurred major chains to add more healthful items to their menus. CSPI also has halted numerous deceptive food labels and ads, through complaints to government agencies, discussions with companies, and litigation. Jacobson and CSPI have long been concerned about junk-food marketing aimed at kids, the nutritional quality of school meals, microbial contamination of foods, and the safety of food additives.
Jacobson is author or co-author of numerous publications, including: Six Arguments for a Greener Diet (2006, CSPI); Restaurant Confidential (2002, Workman Publishing); Marketing Madness (1995, Westview Press); What Are We Feeding Our Kids? (1994, Workman); The Fast-Food Guide (1986, 1991 Workman); The Complete Eater’s Digest and Nutrition Scoreboard (1986; Doubleday & Co.); Salt: The Brand Name Guide to Sodium (1983, Workman); Eater’s Digest: The Consumer’s Factbook of Food Additives (1972, 1976, Doubleday & Co.).
Jacobson is the recipient of the Food Marketing Institute’s Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award (1992) and the Food and Drug Administration’s Commissioner’s Special Citation and Harvey W. Wiley Medal.
Dr. Jacobson’s numerous media appearances include many major broadcast, cable, and radio news shows. He has had numerous technical papers and letters published in the Journal of Molecular Biology, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His popular articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Christian Science Monitor, and other periodicals.
Alexi Kampov-Polevoy, M.D., Ph.D.
Alexi Kampov-Polevoy is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is a graduate of the Moscow Medical School in Russia, where he received his Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1979. Dr. Kampov-Polevoy’s research career spans a wide spectrum from basic animal studies to clinical research. Although his primary research interest is the study of mechanisms of predisposition to alcohol use disorders and individual pharmacotherapy of these disorders, he developed an interest in eating disorders after discovering the existence of strong association between genetic risk of alcoholism and various characteristics of perception/consumption of sweet-tasting foods in both animals and humans.
These include:
In animals:
- The finding of high positive correlation between consumption of sweet solutions and voluntary alcohol intake in rats (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 1990, 1994)
- The finding of impaired control over consumption of sweets in rats genetically selected for high voluntary alcohol intake (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 1995; Overstreet, Kampov-Polevoy et al., 1997)
- The finding of association between genetic risk of alcoholism and the preference for stronger sweet taste (Sinclair et al., 1992)
- The finding that consumption of sweet solutions causes protracted suppression of alcohol intake in rats genetically selected for high alcohol intake (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 1995)
In humans:
- The development of the 12-item Sweet Preference Questionnaire (SPQ-12) that allows to evaluate sensitivity to mood altering effect of sweet foods and ability to control consumption of these foods (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 2006)
- The finding that sweet-liking phenotype (i.e., preference to stronger sweet taste) is associated with elevated sensitivity to mood altering effect of sweet foods and impaired ability to control consumption of these foods (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 2006)
- The finding that sweet liking phenotype is associated with genetic risk of alcoholism (Kampov-Polevoy et al., 2001, 2003a, b)
His current research interests are: hedonic response to sweet taste in patients with eating disorders; use of SL phenotype for prediction of individual naltrexone effect in alcoholism treatment.
Martijn Katan, Ph.D.
Martijn B. Katan received a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Amsterdam University in 1977, and then worked at Wageningen University in the Netherlands until 2005. He is now an Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Professor of Nutrition at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Dr. Katan is on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and PloS Medicine, and member of the Dutch Health Council – the equivalent of the US Institute of Medicine – and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
His papers are among the most highly cited in the field (http://isihighlycited.com). Katan and coworkers have made several discoveries relevant to prevention of coronary heart disease. These include:
- The finding that trans fatty acids raise LDL and lower HDL cholesterol (Mensink and Katan 1990). This set off a chain of events that led to removal of trans fatty acids from foods.
- The finding that high-carbohydrate diets lower HDL cholesterol and raise triglycerides (Brussaard 1982; Mensink & Katan 1987). This helped to shift nutritional advice from low-fat high-carbohydrate diets to diets higher in cis-unsaturated fat.
- Elucidation of cafestol as the compound in unfiltered coffee responsible for elevating serum cholesterol. This has led to changes in coffee brewing practices and in industrial production techniques.
- Studies on flavonoids conducted with Daan Kromhout and Peter Hollman showed that high flavonoid intake was associated with reduced risk of coronary heart disease (Hertog et al., Lancet 1992).
- The invention of “Mendelian Randomization” as a technique for eliminating confounding in epidemiology (Keavny B. “Katan’s remarkable foresight: genes and causality 18 years on.” Intl J Epidemiol 2004; 33:11–14).
His current research interests are: B-vitamins, homocysteine, and cognition (Durga, 2007); the mechanism of action of cafestol, the cholesterol-raising lipid from coffee beans; and effects of foods on caloric intake. Katan has collaborated widely with the food industry, but has expressed concern about the way relations between nutrition research and industry are developing (Katan and de Roos, Science 2003; Katan, PloS Medicine 2007).
Richard D. Mattes, M.P.H., Ph.D., R.D.
Dr. Mattes is Professor of Foods and Nutrition at Purdue University, Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Affiliated Scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. His research focuses on the areas of hunger and satiety, regulation of food intake in humans, food preferences, human cephalic phase responses and taste and smell.
At Purdue University, Dr. Mattes is Director of the Ingestive Behavior Research Center; Director of the Analytical Core Laboratory for the Botanical Center for Age Related Diseases and Chair of the Human Subjects Review Committee. He also holds numerous external responsibilities including: Editorial board of Appetite; Ear; Nose and Throat Journal; Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the International Life Science Institute, North America; Secretary of the Rose Marie Pangborn Sensory Science Scholarship Fund and committee member of the adult weight management certificate program with the American Dietetic Association.
Dr. Mattes has been the principal investigator on National Institutes of Health grants continuously since 1984, and has authored over 150 publications. Dr. Mattes earned an undergraduate degree in biology and a Masters degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan as well as a doctorate degree in Human Nutrition from Cornell University. He conducted post-doctoral studies at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Monell Chemical Senses Center.
Barry Popkin, Ph.D.
The IDOC is spearheaded by Dr. Barry M. Popkin, Professor of Nutrition (Ph.D. in Economics, Cornell University, 1974). Dr. Popkin conducts global research on the nutrition transition, trends in dietary intake, physical activity, and body composition. He is an economist and large population nutrition epidemiology scholar specializing in the study of the determinants and consequences of nutritional, health, and demographic behaviors and their interrelationships. Dr. Popkin has a special interest in the way environmental factors — interacting with demographic, social, and economic factors — affect dietary, physical activity, and body composition (a main focus on obesity) patterns and trends. Dr. Popkin has an active US research program, including a series of longitudinal studies on environmental and economic factors affecting adolescent and young adult dietary, physical activity, and obesity patterns. Included is a focus on understanding some of the causes of economic and race-ethnic disparities. His international research on the nutrition transition includes a series of comparative and longitudinal studies of obesity, dietary, and physical activity patterns and their causes. This global research includes detailed longitudinal studies that he directs in China and Russia, active involvement with longitudinal studies in the Philippines, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and Brazil, and related work in a number of other countries. Dr. Popkin initiated and directed the China Health and Nutrition Survey, a longitudinal study of 19,000 (with nationwide surveys in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2011), the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring survey (with 14 nationally representative surveys from 1992 to 2008), and the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. He is the author of over 275 refereed journal articles and has a book The World Is Fat (Penguin, Dec 2008).
Walter C. Willett, M.D., Dr. P.H.
Dr. Walter Willett is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, studied food science at Michigan State University, and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School before obtaining a Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Willett has focused much of his work over the last 25 years on the development of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases. He has applied these methods starting in 1980 in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Together, these cohorts that include nearly 300,000 men and women with repeated dietary assessments are providing the most detailed information on the long-term health consequences of food choices.
Dr. Willett has published over 1,000 articles, primarily on lifestyle risk factors for heart disease and cancer, and has written the textbook, Nutritional Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press. He also has three books book for the general public, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, which has appeared on most major bestseller lists, Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less, co-authored with Mollie Katzen, and most recently, The Fertility Diet, co-authored with Jorge Chavarro and Pat Skerrett. Dr. Willett is the most cited nutritionist internationally, and is among the five most cited persons in all fields of clinical science. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of many national and international awards for his research.
