Katelyn  Chiang

Katelyn Chiang is a Nutrition and Health Sciences PhD candidate at Emory University. Her research focuses on maternal and child nutrition, and she is particularly interested in the impacts of early feeding and nutrition on health across the life course. Katelyn's dissertation research aims to better characterize early life free sugar consumption in the United States, describe the association between sugar-containing beverage intake patterns and a child’s risk of developing obesity, and to determine how other factors, especially the prenatal environment, may modify this association.

As part of her work, Katelyn also collaborates with researchers and clinicians from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta on projects related to chronic disease surveillance, childhood obesity prevention programming, and nutrition education in pediatric primary care settings. Katelyn is also a MCH Doctoral Scholar with Emory's Center for Excellence in Maternal and Child Health.

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Katelyn worked for CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity where her research focused on nutrition during the “first 1,000 days” including breastfeeding, complementary feeding, and micronutrient nutrition. She also has previous experience researching maternal substance use and mental health and implementing community-based childhood obesity prevention programming. Katelyn received an MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University and a BA in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.