Preview: Scholarship Conference – Latinos and Cardiometabolic Disease

September 11, 2018

Dr. Bertha Hidalgo, an associate scientist at the UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center and Faculty Scholar at the UAB Center for the Study of Community Health, will provide the September 25 Scholarship Conference lecture hosted by the College of Community Health Sciences. Her lecture will focus on innovative research on Latinos and cardiometabolic diseases – obesity, cardiovascular disease and type-2 diabetes – and implications for medical practice. The lecture by Hidalgo, who is also an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, comes during The University of Alabama’s Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month. Hidalgo has degrees from Stanford University, the University of Southern California and UAB. Her research interests include cardiometabolic diseases, genetic epidemiology, health disparities and Latino Health. She has received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation New Connections Program to investigate whether genetic and epigenetic differences exist between subgroups of Latinos for cardiometabolic diseases. She recently became principal investigator of Epigenomics of Cardiometabolic Disease in Mexican Americans, a K01 award focused on better understanding of the genetic and environmental contributors to cardiometabolic diseases in a cohort of Mexican Americans. Hidalgo is an active member of several epidemiology and public health professional societies, including chair of the Minority Affairs Committee for the American College of Epidemiology.