Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health	Postdoctoral Fellowship		Genetic & Nutritional Epidemiology
University of Washington	Ph.D.		Epidemiology
University of Washington	M.P.H.		Epidemiology
Beijing Medical University	M.D.		Preventive Medicine

Dr. Cuilin Zhang is a Chaired Professor on Women's Health at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and the founding Director of the Global Centre for Asian Women's Health, and the Lead for Population Health Study program of Asian Centre for Reproductive Longevity and Equity. Prof. Zhang holds an Adjunct Professorship at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before joining NUS, Prof. Zhang was a Senior Investigator with tenure and interim Chief of the Epidemiology Branch, Division of Population Health Research, NICHD, National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA (2007-2021). Prof. Zhang served in the NIH Nutritional Research Task Force Writing Group for developing strategic plan on national nutritional research in the next 10 years (2021-2030) and was the NIH Intramural Subject Matter Expert of multiple themes: Nutrition Across the Lifespan, Foundational Nutrition Science; Approaches, Methods, and Tools for Dietary Intake Assessment.

Prof. Zhang is a clinical epidemiologist whose work unites nutrition. biochemistry, genetics, clinical medicine, and public health, and is at the interface of disease etiology and prevention strategies in the arena of women's and children's health over lifespan and across generations. She is leading a multi-disciplinary research program focusing on the improvement of women’s health and human potentials through diet and lifestyle modification, omics research, and early screening in general. Current primary focuses are on nutrition and lifestyle, metabolic and genetic determinants, and health consequences of obesity, gestational diabetes and type 2 diabetes, and related comorbidities across the lifespan.

Prof. Zhang has initiated and led multiple large cohort studies on nutrition, maternal and child health, diabetes and chronic diseases supported by NIH and National University of Singapore. Along with extensive epidemiological and clinical data as well as related biospecimen collected, these studies were well-designed for investigating a broad range of health and disease outcomes and early life precursors of perinatal, pediatric, and adult diseases based on a multi-omics platform.

Prof. Zhang currently serves in the Oversight Advisory Committee for Go Red for Women’s Health Research Network of the American Heart Association, the International Advisory Committee for Chinese National Birth Cohort, and the External Advisory Board for the Cohort of Mothers/Madres in Texas, USA (COMMIT). Prof. Zhang is an Associate Editor for Diabetes Care and American Journal of Epidemiology and serves in the editorial board for Precision Nutrition.