Big Data, Consumer Technology, and the Obesity Epidemic: Emerging Science and Ethical Considerations

Organizers

Jason Block, MD, MPH

Harvard Medical School

Jason Block is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Obesity Prevention Program of the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. He completed an internal medicine residency and chief residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar. Dr. Block's primary research interests are in neighborhood-level determinants of weight gain and obesity and the evaluation of governmental and institutional policies and other novel interventions to improve diet. He is a primary care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a clinician in the Brigham and Women's Weight Management Clinic.

Matthew Harding, PhD

University of California Irvine

Matthew Harding is an Economist and Data Scientist who uses Big Data to answer economic questions related to individual consumption and choices in areas such as health, energy, and transportation. He is an Associate Professor of Economics and Statistics and UC Irvine. He holds a PhD in Economics from MIT and an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University. As a data scientist he develops cutting edge econometric methods for the analysis of "deep data", large and information-rich data sets derived from many seemingly unrelated sources to provide novel economic insights. He is particularly interested in the role of technology and automation to induce behavior change and help individuals live happier and healthier lives. At the same time his research emphasizes solutions for achieving triple-win strategies. These are solutions that not only benefit individual consumers, but are profitable for firms, and have a large positive impact on society at large.

John G. Kral, MD, PhD

SUNY Downstate Medical Center

With an MA in Psychology, Dr. Kral attended medical school at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, specializing in Surgery and Medicine, completing PhD studies and initiating the obesity surgery program there. In 1981 he started the Division of Surgical Metabolism, St. Luke's–Roosevelt Hospital, Columbia University and in 1983 co-founded the American Society for Bariatric Surgery. Dr. Kral initiated and co-organized the 1991 NIH Consensus Development Conference: "Gastrointestinal Surgery for Severe Obesity". With studies of body composition, adipose tissue receptors and lipid and carbohydrate metabolism his current interests include ingestive behavior, determinants of metabolic obesity, effects of gestational stress on urban health, the importance of the intrauterine environment and epigenetics. In 2012 The Obesity Society awarded Dr. Kral the AJ Stunkard Lifetime Achievement Award. He is past working group chair of the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science "Obesity, Diabetes and Nutrition-Related Diseases" at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Kristina H. Lewis, MD, MPH, SM

Wake Forest School of Medicine

Kristina H. Lewis, MD, MPH, SM, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. She is an internal medicine physician practicing in the field of bariatrics. Dr. Lewis' research focuses on developing and evaluating interventions for obesity and related comorbidities. This work ranges from comparative effectiveness studies of bariatric surgical procedures, to trials of novel behavioral interventions for diet, to studies of policy interventions for improving diet at the population-level. Dr. Lewis is currently serving as Chair for the Health Services Research Section of The Obesity Society, and Chair of the Obesity, Diabetes and Nutrition-Related Diseases Working Group for the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science.

Satchidananda Panda, PhD

SALK Institute

The key to healthy long life may lie in changing a light bulb or deciding when to eat. Dr. Satchin Panda's circadian rhythm research has discovered that light and meal time have profound health impact. He found a new light sensor in our eye measures blue light to tune brain functions ranging from falling asleep to throbbing migraine pain in a sunny day. This simple discovery has triggered a new field of light therapeutics in which phones have come up with features to flip a button to "night shift", blue filtering glasses are new sleeping pills, and healthy lights are new antidepressants. Dr. Panda also discovered that the number of hours between our breakfast and dinner may be as important as day's calorie counts. Just by eating all food within 8–12 h every day can sustain the primordial circadian rhythm and prevent obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, poor sleep. Dr. Panda grew up in India, did his doctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute, and postdoctoral training at Novartis before starting his independent research lab at the Salk Institute, La Jolla. He is a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Research, an American Federation of Aging Research mid-career scientist.

Gilles Bergeron, PhD

The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science

Dr. Gilles Bergeron has worked in international nutrition for more than 25 years. He has extensive experience in nutrition in the life cycle, food security, agriculture/nutrition linkages and monitoring and evaluation. A founding member and Deputy Director of the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project, he spent 18 years overseeing FANTA's work in policies and programs; nutrition and infectious diseases; maternal and child nutrition; agriculture/nutrition linkages and emergency nutrition response. Prior to joining FANTA, he spent 6 years as Research Fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and 3 years with the Institute of Nutrition for Central America and Panama (INCAP) in Guatemala. He has operated in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and his work has been published in leading scientific journals such as The Lancet, Advances in Nutrition, World Development, the Journal of Development Studies, and Food and Nutrition Bulletin. He received his PhD in development sociology from Cornell University in 1994.

Mireille Mclean, MA, MPH

The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science

Mireille Seneclauze Mclean joined the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2011 as a Program Manager, and was later promoted to Director. Her activities include managing the growing pool of research grants issues through the Sackler Institute's Research Funds, organizing multi-disciplinary workshops and symposia in the field of nutrition, and supporting the dissemination of research. Prior to this, she spent over 10 years doing fieldwork for several international NGOs intervening in crisis situations. In that role, Ms. Mclean defined and directed the implementation of programs in nutrition, health, food security and sanitation for vulnerable population groups in South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East; managed large grant programs for displaced populations and conducted a number of participatory research assessments and nutritional surveys. She also worked as a Program Coordinator at the Bureau of Public Health in Paris, France, successfully improving the uptake of tuberculosis screening among at-risk population groups. Throughout her work in nutrition and public health, Ms. Mclean is interested in highlighting the importance of implementation, delivery systems, and partnerships to translate science into better outcomes. She holds an MA in Development Economics and International Development from the University of Sussex and a Master of Public Health from the Liverpool Faculty of Medicine.

Speakers

Lori B. Andrews, JD

Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology

Lori Andrews is a law professor and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at Chicago–Kent College of Law. She is an internationally recognized expert on emerging technologies. Andrews is the author of 11 non-fiction books, including I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, and more than 150 articles on health care policy, biotechnology, and digital technologies. She also writes mystery books (Sequence, The Silent Assassin, and Immunity). Andrews chaired the federal advisory committee to the Human Genome Project and has advised governments and professional groups ranging from the G8 science ministers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. She grounds her policy analyses in detailed empirical studies, for which she has received grants from NIH, NSF, U.S. Congress, U.S. Department of Energy, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, and M.D. Anderson Foundation. Andrews has been a visiting professor at Princeton and at Case Western. She received her BA summa cum laude from Yale College and her JD from Yale Law School. The National Law Journal listed her as one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America." The American Bar Association Journal describes Andrews as "a lawyer with a literary bent who has the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator."

Gary Bennett, PhD

Duke University

Gary G. Bennett is the Bishop-MacDermott Family Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Global Health and Medicine at Duke University. He directs the Duke Global Digital Health Science Center and the Duke Obesity Prevention Program. Dr. Bennett is President-Elect of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Dr. Bennett's research program designs, tests, and disseminates digital obesity treatments for medically vulnerable patients in primary care practice. Dr. Bennett developed the interactive obesity treatment approach (iOTA), which has been evaluated in several trials, both domestically and abroad. His recent work demonstrates the effectiveness of coach-led, digital health obesity interventions (delivered via text, smartphone, and interactive voice response) for medically vulnerable patients. Dr. Bennett has authored more than 125 scientific papers in the past decade and his research program has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bennett has served on numerous NIH committees, grant review panels, editorial boards, and guidelines councils. He also co-founded two digital health startups: Crimson Health Solutions (acquired by Health Dialog in 2007) and Scale Down. Dr. Bennett has degrees from Morehouse College and Duke University; before joining Duke in 2009, he served on the faculties of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Charon Gwynn, PhD

New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Dr. Gwynn is the Deputy Commissioner for the Division of Epidemiology at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) where she oversees the Divisions efforts to gather, analyze and disseminates information about New Yorkers' health. Prior to joining DOHMH Dr. Gwynn served as the Deputy Director the Strategic Information Unit at ICAP, Columbia University where she provided technical assistance and capacity building support for routine monitoring and evaluation (M&E), surveillance, and electronic health information systems in the context of US government-funded HIV programs in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. Prior to ICAP Dr. Gwynn was a Research Scientist at the New York City Department of Health where she participated in the design, planning, implementation and publication of results from the first community-level Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in NYC (NYC HANES). Previously, as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer with CDC-Atlanta, Dr. Gwynn worked to evaluate and analyze data from the world's largest on-going telephone health survey system -the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Dr. Gwynn received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from New York University in 1999.

Barbara E. Millen, DrPH, RD, FADA

Millennium Prevention, Inc.

Dr. Barbara E. Millen is currently the President of the Boston Nutrition Foundation, Inc. (BNF), an academic consulting firm through which she is engaged in federal, academic and corporate consulting and public speaking. She is also President of Millennium Prevention, Inc. (MP), a private, research-driven life sciences company with a public health mission. Millennium conducts translational research and offers comprehensive web and mobile platforms under the registered trademark HealthMain (healthmain.com and myhealthmain.com) which focus on prevention in clinical medical practice and community public health settings. Until founding BNF and MP in 2009, Dr. Millen was Professor of Family Medicine and Graduate Medical Sciences at the Boston University School of Medicine, where she was also the founding Chair of the Graduate Programs in Medical Nutrition Sciences and the Director of Nutrition Research at the internationally-renown, Framingham Heart Study. Dr. Millen is an expert in the nutritional epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, chronic disease risk, and population aging. She has led research teams examining the lifestyle etiology of chronic diseases; the causes and consequences of malnutrition in advancing age; and strategies to chronic disease risk in minority and immigrant populations. Dr. Millen earned her master's and doctoral degrees in public health from the Harvard University School of Public Health. Dr. Millen recently served (2008–2013) on the National Institutes of Health expert committees which developed the Guideline for the Management of Overweight and Obesity in Adults and Lifestyle Management to Reduce Cardiovascular Disease Risk. She also chaired the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee which informed the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the basic framework for our Nation's nutrition and health policies. She has authored four books on health-related topics. She received the Elaine Monsen Award of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation which recognizes an outstanding "body of research that benefits the health professions and the world."

Tooraj Mirshahi, PhD

Geisinger Clinic

Dr. Tooraj Mirshahi received his PhD in Pharmacology from Virginia Commonwealth University. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, he joined the faculty at Geisinger, where he is an Associate Professor at the Weis Center for Research. Dr. Mirshahi is also a member of the Geisinger Obesity Institute. His current work is funded by grants from the NIH (NIGMS and NIDDK) as well as a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceutical. Dr. Mirshahi's training is in cell biology and signal transduction. A major interest of his has been signaling in the leptin-melanocortin pathway that controls feeding, satiety and energy expenditure. At Geisinger, we have extensive longitudinal clinical data on a large cohort of patients, many of whom are obese and a large number of whom have undergone bariatric surgery. In addition, we have collected genetic data both genotyping and whole exome sequencing from over 60,000 patients. He has combined his understanding of cellular and molecular basis of obesity with the available genetics data to look at factors that play critical roles in obesity as well as outcomes after bariatric surgery.

Satchidananda Panda, PhD

SALK Institute

The key to healthy long life may lie in changing a light bulb or deciding when to eat. Dr. Satchin Panda's circadian rhythm research has discovered that light and meal time have profound health impact. He found a new light sensor in our eye measures blue light to tune brain functions ranging from falling asleep to throbbing migraine pain in a sunny day. This simple discovery has triggered a new field of light therapeutics in which phones have come up with features to flip a button to "night shift", blue filtering glasses are new sleeping pills, and healthy lights are new antidepressants. Dr. Panda also discovered that the number of hours between our breakfast and dinner may be as important as day's calorie counts. Just by eating all food within 8–12 h every day can sustain the primordial circadian rhythm and prevent obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, poor sleep. Dr. Panda grew up in India, did his doctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute, and postdoctoral training at Novartis before starting his independent research lab at the Salk Institute, La Jolla. He is a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Research, an American Federation of Aging Research mid-career scientist.

Ruth E. Patterson, PhD

University of California San Diego

Dr. Ruth E. Patterson, PhD is professor in the UCSD Department of Family Medicine & Public Health; as well as Associate Director of Population Sciences and leader of the Cancer Prevention Program at the Moores Cancer Center. She spent 12 years at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she was Co-PI of the Coordinating Center for the Women's Health Initiative nationwide study of 161,808 postmenopausal women. Dr. Patterson also served as Co-PI of a study of 75,000 Washington State residents examining vitamin supplement use and cancer risk. After moving to UCSD, Dr. Patterson was awarded one of only four-in-the-nation NCI designated Transdisciplinary Centers on Energetics and Cancer (TREC). The objective of the UCSD TREC Center is to assemble transdisciplinary scientific collaborators to address questions regarding insulin resistance and inflammation underlying the association of energetics with breast cancer carcinogenesis, from the cell to the community. Her current research interests are focused on the hypothesis that prolonged nightly fasting can reduce the risk of chronic diseases, including some cancers, by improving multiple metabolic parameters.

Michael K. Price, PhD

Georgia State University

Michael Price is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include experimental and behavioral economics, the economics of charity, environmental economics and health economics. His research focuses on the use of experimental methods and, in particular, the use of field experiments to test economic theories and understand the factors that influence individual decision-making. To collect data for his research, he has partnered with various utilities, government organizations, private firms, and non-profit organizations to implement large-scale field experiments.

Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc

University of Michigan

Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc, is a physician, researcher, and educator interested in studying learning health systems, making new discoveries about disease, and improving patient care through technology. His research areas include natural language processing of clinical notes, risk prediction using high-dimensional data, mobile health apps, and wearable technologies. He is an assistant professor of Learning Health Sciences in the Division of Learning and Knowledge Systems and an assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Singh completed his internal medicine residency at UCLA Medical Center, where he served as chief resident, and a nephrology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He completed his medical education at the University of Michigan Medical School and holds a master's degree in medical sciences in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard Medical School.

David Siscovick, MD, MPH

The New York Academy of Medicine

David Siscovick, MD, MPH, is Senior Vice President for Research at the New York Academy of Medicine. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, and was formerly the Co-director of the University's Cardiovascular Health Research Unit and Director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training Program. For more than three decades, he was a practicing general internist and clinical epidemiologist who had a commitment to impacting the health of the public, with a focus on bridging clinical medicine and public health. Dr. Siscovick has a highly successful track record of research related to chronic disease prevention, health disparities, and successful aging, with more than 650 peer-reviewed publications and multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health. His research has focused broadly on the epidemiology and prevention of cardiovascular disease across the lifespan. He has led interdisciplinary teams and large-scale multi-institutional collaborations, and he has mentored young investigators from multiple institutions. He has been the principal investigator or a co-investigator on multiple NIH grants. He recently completed a two-year term as the Chair of the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention.

Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD

Columbia University

Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti is assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Systems Biology, and Medicine and is Director of Clinical Informatics at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Stanford University where he focused on the development of novel statistical and computational methods for observational data mining. He applied these methods to drug safety surveillance where he discovered and validated new drug effects and interactions. His lab at Columbia is focused on expanding upon his previous work in detecting, explaining, and validating drug effects and drug interactions from large-scale observational data. Widely published in both clinical and bioinformatics, Dr. Tatonetti is passionate about the integration of hospital data (stored in the electronic health records) and high-dimensional biological data (captured using next-generation sequencing, high-throughput screening, and other "omics" technologies). Dr. Tatonetti has been featured by the New York Times, Genome Web, and Science Careers. His work has been picked up by the mainstream and scientific media and generated hundreds of news articles.