Research interests: nutrition, epidemiology, omics, cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors

Generally, research projects in Dr. Zhong’s group use big sample size or high-dimensional data sets, focusing on nutritional and epidemiologic studies of cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors. A variety of interdisciplinary methodologies are applied. Some projects are listed below.

1. Determining the associations of nutrients, foods, and dietary patterns with cardiometabolic diseases and mortality using the following data resources
   • A pooled data set combining a number of prospective cohort studies of US adults, including ARIC, CARDIA, CHS, FHS, FOS, JHS, and MESA
   • Publicly available data sets such as NHANES
2. Investigating the association between mitochondrial DNA and cardiometabolic health and whether this association can be modified by nutritional factors
3. A metabolome-wide association study of incident type 2 diabetes
   • Including the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) as the discovery cohort and the Rotterdam Study as the replication cohort
   • Analyzing untargeted NMR data that consist of 61,180 variables
4. Genetic risk, healthy lifestyle, lifetime risk of chronic disease, and compression of morbidities: a life course approach