Profile
Lorena S. Pacheco is a Ph.D. candidate in the Epidemiology track of the UC San Diego-San Diego State University Joint Doctoral Program in Public Health. Her research focuses on nutrition and chronic disease prevention. She is a practicing bilingual and bicultural registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) and has worked with migrant, minority and underserved populations in the U.S. and Mexico as both a RDN and research collaborator. Lorena established the Nutritional Services Department for the international public health field project VIIDAI, Viajes Interinstitucional de Integración Docente, Asistencial y de Investigación, in Mexico in 2011. Since then, she has instructed and mentored medical and public health students on essential nutritional and public health tenets applied at different levels of disease prevention in rural communities. Lorena’s dissertation, Associations Between Diet and Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality: The California Teachers Study, examines the relationship between diet quality and dietary patterns with cardiovascular and mortality related outcomes within the California Teachers Study cohort. As well, she works with the multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional team of the Santiago Longitudinal Study on cardiometabolic disease risk endpoints.
