Lorena Pacheco Lifelong SDSU Alumni’s Career in Public Health
Dr. Pacheco became interested in public health as a career while working as a clinical dietitian. She had a patient that was recovering from a stroke and because of the experience she had with him, other patients, and previous community nutrition projects, Dr. Pacheco decided to pursue an MPH. She states that she wanted to affect larger groups and focus on disease prevention as well as help improve the quality of life for the population as a whole. Dr. Pacheco used her nutrition and dietetics training during her MPH and concentrated on nutritional epidemiology. She continued in this field and worked on a nutritional epidemiology-focused doctoral dissertation. This led her to a postdoctoral research fellow position at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she has combined her passion and interests in community nutrition, clinical trials, metabolomics, planetary health, and health disparities.
She states that she thinks her first passion – nutrition and dietetics – allowed her to have an appreciation for food and food systems, and address questions regarding our relationship with food, what we put in our bodies, and how our environment affects those choices. Dr. Pacheco mentions that this also allowed her to have thoughtful conversations about food, culture, environment, and health with patients and colleagues.
Dr. Pacheco’s research interests include nutrition, ethnic health disparities, and chronic disease prevention – particularly cardiometabolic disease prevention. She is currently involved in several projects that consider different methodologies: metabolomics, interventions, cost-effectiveness and microsimulation modeling, and longitudinal analysis with dietary exposures and different chronic disease endpoints.
Dr. Pacheco has a few recent publications which include a recent nutritional epidemiology publication focuses on the longitudinal association between consumption of avocado and risk of cardiovascular disease. Additionally, another recently published paper highlights the microsimulation modeling work with collaborators from the Prevention Research Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where her team estimated the excess mortality associated with elevated body weight nationally and by state and subgroup.
In her spare time, Dr. Pacheco enjoys all the elements of cooking and baking. Dr. Pacheco shares Chinese, Mexican, and Mediterranean ancestry and enjoys sharing dishes with close friends and family. She loves to explore new coffeehouses and neighborhoods. Dr. Pacheco likes to be outdoors when she can and loves photography, baseball, traveling, museums, and singing. She has also always enjoyed learning about cultural and food anthropology. Currently, Dr. Pacheco is picking up knitting as a new hobby.
