My career aim is to improve clinical outcomes and quality of life in older patients with heart failure (HF), with a primary focus on practical dietary interventions for prevention and treatment. I led the first NIH-funded dietary intervention study in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and the first NIH-funded study of nutritional support in post-discharge patients with HF. I recently completed a VA-funded dietary intervention study that combined medically tailored meals and dietary counseling in veterans at risk for HF, and am the Study Chair for a large multicenter VA trial evaluating the impact of medically tailored meals in post-discharge patients with HF. I have completed multiple studies evaluating potential barriers to adequate nutrition in patients with HF such as frailty, mobility limitations, cognitive impairment, symptom burden, and care regimen complexity.
As another component of my work, I collaborate as the clinical lead on several grant-funded projects to phenotype HF. These studies use clinical data and physiology-informed machine learning to create “digital twins,” individualized cardiovascular models which could be used for outcome prediction and precision-medicine approaches to target therapies.