Dr. Mercedes Sotos Prieto

Biography

Mercedes Sotos Prieto is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a trained nutritional epidemiologist from Spain with a Ph.D. that received an extraordinary award. Her academic work includes advanced coursework and research focused on conducting randomized clinical studies and gene expression analysis during her doctoral studies at the University of Valencia, Spain. Dr. Sotos-Prieto's Ph.D. research centered on nutritional genomics, particularly gene-environment interactions and the prevention of obesity and cardiovascular risk factors as part of the PREDIMED study, which was a randomized control trial involving 7,000 participants. Furthermore, she has collaborated with the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer at the Medical Research Centre in Cambridge, UK. Her postdoctoral research at CNIC in Madrid involved evaluating the efficacy of school-based behavioral interventions for health promotion among children aged 3 to 5. Currently, her research investigates how dietary and lifestyle behaviors influence cardiovascular and diabetes endpoints, including their interactions with genetic risk factors. She has focused on lifestyle score associations with cardiometabolic parameters among Boston Puerto Ricans and is particularly interested in primordial prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Dr. Sotos-Prieto’s work includes studying changes in dietary quality and lifestyles over time as they relate to clinical risk factors and CVD mortality in large cohorts, such as the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which have had over 100,000 participants tracked for more than 24 years. In recognition of her contributions, she has received several awards, including the Outstanding Fellow Award from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health's Cardiovascular Epidemiology Program in 2015.

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Awards