Natalia Elvira  Poveda Rey

Dr. Natalia Elvira Poveda Rey is a postdoctoral fellow with the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center. Natalia is a Fulbright Scholar from Colombia. She has a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition and Dietetics and a Master of Science in Biochemistry, both from the National University of Colombia, and she received her PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences from Emory University. Prior to Emory, she worked on a prospective cohort study that followed healthy women during pregnancy and three and six months postpartum to identify serum biomarkers that predict the early onset of maternal and perinatal outcomes. In addition, she worked on a research project to study biomarkers of obesity in a group of young obese non-diabetic men. Later, she served as one of the leading investigators of the breastfeeding and complementary feeding components of the National Nutrition Survey in Colombia (ENSIN 2015). While studying at Emory, she collaborated with the Consortium of Health-Orientated Research in Transitioning Societies (COHORTS), a collaborative network of six birth cohorts from five low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The focus of her doctoral dissertation was the life-course epidemiology of adult body composition through three distinct lenses: growth across the life span, early life nutrition, and the adult environment. Currently, she collaborates with Dr. Solveig Cunningham on the projects “Dynamics and Health Consequences of Obesity between Infancy and Young Adulthood in the United States”, and “Multimorbidity patterns of the U.S. adult population”. Natalia’s primary research interests in life course epidemiology and population sciences aim to understand the etiology and mechanisms underlying cardiometabolic and diet-related health outcomes at individual and population levels across the life span.