Lauren Chan

Academic interests

Lauren works on a wide array of ontologies including the Mondo Disease Ontology and the Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO). Lauren’s thesis projects were focused on encoding heterogeneous, self-reported dietary and environmental exposures data to evaluate associations with female reproductive disorders and other health outcomes.

Lauren is trained as a registered dietitian, having earned her B.S. in Dietetics from Oregon State and her M.S. in Family and Consumer Sciences at Illinois State, where she completed her dietetic internship.

Beyond her work in ontologies, Lauren is a contributor to the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) efforts in the pregnancy, diabetes, and machine learning domain teams. Lauren is also the YouTube Coordinator for the Dietitians in Nutrition Support, where she creates educational, nutrition support focused YouTube videos.

Biography

Recent PhD graduate in Nutrition from Oregon State University, investigating the impacts of nutrition therapies and exposures on reproductive health using semantic knowledge integration. Research projects include ontology curation, data standardization and integration, and basic programming. Experienced instructor with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education through both online and in-person platforms. Skilled in video based nutrition education through YouTube (see Dietitians in Nutrition Support channel), medical nutrition therapy, and nutrition research.