11/10/2021
By Joseph Hartman

Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences Professor and Director of the Center for Population Health Katherine L. Tucker has been named the 2021 Distinguished University Professor, UMass Lowell’s most prestigious academic honor for a faculty member.

Each year, the university recognizes one educator for their outstanding contributions in teaching, research and service to the institution.

Tucker is the director of the NIH-funded Center for Population Health at UMass Lowell and editor-in-chief of Advances in Nutrition, an international review journal, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Tucker has contributed to more than 400 articles in scientific journals and carries an H-index of 115 according to Google Scholar. Her research focuses on dietary intake and risk of chronic disease, including osteoporosis, cognitive decline, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease, and on dietary methodology.

Tucker has received more than $30 million in federal and private funding as a principal investigator. Since joining UMass Lowell in 2013, she has been PI of multiple Research Project Grants (R01s). She currently has two active projects: “Bone microarchitecture, diabetes and change in bone mineral density in Puerto Rican adults,” and “Dietary quality, cognitive decline and brain health in Puerto Rican adults”.

Biomedical & Nutritional Sciences Department Chair and Professor Timothy Ford, who jointly nominated Tucker with 15 faculty members including the enthusiastic support of the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences Dean Shortie McKinney, said she is “an outstanding candidate for this award”, and that “her accomplishments and service to her profession are too numerous to do justice to in a brief nomination letter."

“Frankly, her productivity is extraordinary, and yet she has avoided complacency or arrogance in her success and is a wonderful mentor to her students and to junior faculty in the Biomedical & Nutritional Sciences department,” Ford wrote.

Tucker earned her doctoral degree in Nutritional Sciences/International Nutrition from Cornell University and bachelor’s degree in Nutritional Sciences/Community Nutrition from the University of Connecticut.

Tucker is the 14th professor to receive the award since it was established in 2008.

She will deliver the annual Distinguished University Professor Lecture in the spring.