Linda Adair

About

Linda Adair, PhD, is a biological anthropologist and the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research primarily focuses on global nutrition problems, especially in low and middle income countries, with an emphasis on the first '1000 Days'—the period from conception through the first two years of a child's life. She explores factors related to healthy pregnancy, birth outcomes, and early child growth, and investigates how early life factors influence health and well-being in adulthood within the context of the developmental origins of adult health and disease (DOHaD). Dr. Adair has led the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey since 1990, a birth cohort study that contributes to international research on the early origins of obesity and cardiometabolic diseases in low and middle income countries. Her work also includes studies on infant feeding and growth in the context of HIV, focusing on prevention of mother-to-child transmission and the influence of breastfeeding and complementary feeding on infant growth and survival in Malawi, Rwanda, and South Africa. She teaches courses such as International Nutrition and Analytic Methods in Nutritional Epidemiology, and leads the Doctoral Seminar each fall semester. Dr. Adair has received numerous awards for her teaching and research, including the McGavran Award for Excellence in Teaching and the UNC Gillings School of Public Health Teaching…

Research topics

• Genetics
• Biology
• Medicine
• Environmental health
• Evolutionary biology
• Demography
• Geography
• Endocrinology
• Computer Science
• Bioinformatics

Selected publications

• The power of genetic diversity in genome-wide association studies of lipids

  Nature · 2021 · 1032 citations

  DOI

• A saturated map of common genetic variants associated with human height

  Nature · 2022 · 877 citations

  ) account for 40% (45%) of phenotypic variance in populations of European ancestry but only around 10-20% (14-24%) in populations of other ancestries. Effect sizes, associated regions and gene prioritization are similar across ancestries, indicating that reduced prediction accuracy is likely to be explained by linkage disequilibrium and differences in allele frequency within associated regions. Finally, we show that the relevant biological pathways are detectable with smaller sample sizes than a…

  DOI

• The trans-ancestral genomic architecture of glycemic traits

  Nature Genetics · 2021 · 877 citations

  DOI

• Multi-ancestry genetic study of type 2 diabetes highlights the power of diverse populations for discovery and translation

  Nature Genetics · 2022 · 724 citations

  DOI

• Global dietary quality in 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 show wide differences by nation, age, education, and urbanicity

  Nature Food · 2022 · 231 citations

  Evidence on what people eat globally is limited in scope and rigour, especially as it relates to children and adolescents. This impairs target setting and investment in evidence-based actions to support healthy sustainable diets. Here we quantified global, regional and national dietary patterns among children and adults, by age group, sex, education and urbanicity, across 185 countries between 1990 and 2018, on the basis of data from the Global Dietary Database project. Our primary measure was t…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03TW00813303

  NIH · $26k · 2012

• NIH Grant R01HD054501

  NIH · $2.0M · 2014

• NIH Grant R03HD057637

  NIH · $71k · 2010

Frequent coauthors

• Jun Liu

  University of California, San Francisco

  212 shared

• Wei Zhao

  Michigan United

  205 shared

• Wei Zhou

  Yanbian University

  185 shared

• Reynaldo Martorell

  Emory University

  173 shared

• Sang Lee

  South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute

  167 shared

• Shane A. Norris

  South African Medical Research Council

  162 shared

• Zhe Wang

  Zhejiang University

  150 shared

• Barry M. Popkin

  146 shared

Labs

• UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health - Department of NutritionPI

Awards & honors

• McGavran Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Nor…
• UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Teaching Innovat…
• UNC Kellogg International Prize in Nutrition Award and Lectu…

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