Population Research Discovery Seminars
Leveraging Metabolomics and Proteomics to Advance Our Understanding of the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) Diet: Objective Biomarkers and Potential Mediators
Hyunju Kim, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, University of Washington
Parrington Hall Room 360
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
11/06/2026
12:30-1:30 PM PT
360 Parrington Hall
Co-Sponsor(s):
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, which reduced blood pressure and cholesterol in randomized, controlled feeding studies, is recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. However, assessing adherence to the DASH diet is challenging because self-reported diet is prone to measurement error and other systematic biases. Further, although short-term randomized feeding studies found that the DASH diet improves blood pressure and cholesterol, evidence on causal effects of the DASH diet on long-term health outcomes (e.g., incident coronary heart disease) is difficult to obtain. In this presentation, I discuss projects that used metabolomics and proteomics, technologies that allow simultaneous measurement of thousands of small molecules (metabolites) and proteins in biofluids, to discover objective biomarkers of the DASH diet. I also use plasma proteomics to support causal inference about long-term health benefits of the DASH diet.
Dr. Hyunju Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Kim received her PhD in Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed her postdoctoral training in cardiovascular epidemiology at the same institution. Dr. Kim is a nutritional and cardiovascular epidemiologist with a strong interest in multiple omics data. Dr. Kim’s research is focused on building evidence on the role of diets for cardiovascular disease prevention, and identifying metabolic and biological pathways that are modifiable by healthy dietary patterns. Dr. Kim currently serves as a PI of a grant that aims to identify proteomic and epigenetic signatures of plant-based diets using data from three large observational studies in the US.