Deborah Clegg, PhD, has a unique background in both clinical and basic sciences and extensive experience as a grant reviewer for institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Diabetes Association, the Veterans Administration, and the Swiss Government Federal Foundation. She has been awarded numerous grants as either a principal investigator or co-principal investigator. Clegg was formerly a clinical dietitian, diabetes educator and director of Master’s Degree Programs in Nutrition at Emory University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She has made substantial contributions to the scientific literature through her basic science where the over-arching goal of her research is to understand how nutrients and hormones influence disease prevalence. Her basic science laboratory determined how sex hormones, estrogens in particular, impact food intake, body weight and energy homeostasis. She has authored or co-authored over 125 publications in high impact journals including: The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Cell Metabolism and Diabetes. She was also the recent recipient of the 2019 Gill Award for Transformative Research in Neuroscience. Her immediate goals include learning about the research and scholarship of faculty, establishing a strong infrastructure in CNHP including quality control procedures for our laboratories and boilerplate materials, as well as providing tailored assistance and mentoring of faculty in pursuit of funding for scholarship. Clegg will also be establishing her program of research in these initial months. Specialization: Research, Diabetes, Metabolism, Sex Hormones, Brain, Appetite, Nutrition, Body Weight Regulation, Cell-based Assays, Basic Science, Transgender Individual Health/Metabolism, Diet and Kidney Disease Research Interests: Sex hormones and their impact on metabolism, estrogen’s role in the brain to regulate appetite, estrogen’s role in adipose tissues to regulate insulin sensitivity, estrogen’s role in mediating cognition/depression, nutrients impact on obesity, sex hormones influence on metabolism of nutrients, cell based assays of sex hormones, the impact of gender affirming/confirming surgery in transgender individuals, the intersection between sex hormones and sex chromosomes and metabolism, the influence of potassium on nutritional outcomes, hyperkalemia and kidney disease