Ellen W. Demerath

About

Ellen W. Demerath is a Professor of Epidemiology and Community Health and the Director of the Driven to Discover Research Facility at the University of Minnesota. She is also affiliated with the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain and the Healthy Weight Research Center. Her research expertise spans body mass index, body composition, adiposity, genetics, obesity, and menarche, with a strong focus on biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. Professor Demerath's work contributes to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-being, and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. She has been actively involved in interdisciplinary population health science training and research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, focusing on areas such as brain-specific nutritional status indicators for very preterm infants, systems biology of human milk, and life course effects of early childhood interventions. Her extensive research output includes over 230 publications, reflecting her commitment to advancing knowledge in population health, maternal and infant health, and the biological underpinnings of growth and development.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Pediatrics
• Intensive care medicine
• Internal medicine
• Environmental health
• Genetics
• Surgery
• Radiology
• Computational biology
• Biology

Selected publications

• Genetic insights into biological mechanisms governing human ovarian ageing

  Nature · 2021 · 440 citations

  DOI

• Maternal Psychological Distress and Lactation and Breastfeeding Outcomes: a Narrative Review

  Clinical Therapeutics · 2021 · 167 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Understanding the genetic complexity of puberty timing across the allele frequency spectrum

  Nature Genetics · 2024-07-01 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access

  Pubertal timing varies considerably and is associated with later health outcomes. We performed multi-ancestry genetic analyses on ~800,000 women, identifying 1,080 signals for age at menarche. Collectively, these explained 11% of trait variance in an independent sample. Women at the top and bottom 1% of polygenic risk exhibited ~11 and ~14-fold higher risks of delayed and precocious puberty, respectively. We identified several genes harboring rare loss-of-function variants in ~200,000 women, inc…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Clinical Application of Body Composition Methods in Premature Infants

  Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition · 2020 · 31 citations

  Monitoring whole body composition (fat mass and fat-free mass) in preterm infants may assist in optimizing nutrition and promoting growth and neurodevelopment in the neonatal intensive care unit. Currently, body composition assessment is not part of routine clinical evaluation of premature infants. Instead, weight and length are used to assess growth but are known to be poor predictors of adiposity shortly after birth. Although body composition methods, such as magnetic resonance imaging, stable…

  DOI

• Human milk variation is shaped by maternal genetics and impacts the infant gut microbiome

  Cell Genomics · 2024-09-11 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access

  Human milk is a complex mix of nutritional and bioactive components that provide complete nourishment for the infant. However, we lack a systematic knowledge of the factors shaping milk composition and how milk variation influences infant health. Here, we characterize relationships between maternal genetics, milk gene expression, milk composition, and the infant fecal microbiome in up to 310 exclusively breastfeeding mother-infant pairs. We identified 482 genetic loci associated with milk gene e…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HD053685

  NIH · $2.0M · 2012

• NIH Grant M01RR000400

  NIH · $21.0M · 2010

• NIH Grant R01DK064870

  NIH · $1.6M · 2009

Frequent coauthors

• Lenore J. Launer

  National Institute on Aging

  166 shared

• Eric Boerwinkle

  The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

  165 shared

• Pamela J. Schreiner

  159 shared

• David R. Jacobs

  University of Minnesota

  151 shared

• Claude Bouchard

  Université de Montréal

  135 shared

• Na Zhu

  First Affiliated Hospital of Chengdu Medical College

  132 shared

• Rachel A. Whitmer

  University of California, Davis

  132 shared

• Ka He

  Columbia University

  132 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Nutrition

  University of Minnesota

  1990

• M.S., Nutrition

  University of Minnesota

  1985

• B.S., Nutrition

  University of Minnesota

  1983

Similar researchers at University of Minnesota

• Simone Frenchh-88
• Lisa Harnackh-83