Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the 2018 Nutrients Young Investigator Award are Dr. Rachel Murphy and Dr. Hannah Holscher.

Dr. Rachel Murphy is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, Rachel expanded her skillset to population-level nutrition, formed international collaborations, was awarded a $100,000 USD grant as PI, and continued to publish her work in high-impact scientific journals including three as senior author. She has now published a remarkable 53 papers over just eight years, many of which (even recent ones) are highly cited—22 as first author and four as senior author, (Citations: 2,308 since 2010, h-index: 22 via Google Scholar). Her ongoing work reveals novel information about nutrition, body composition, and metabolism and continues to have a significant impact in the areas of aging, chronic disease risk, and oncology. The independent research program she has developed is translational in nature by addressing major gaps in our understanding of nutrition and cancer risk at a population level, the mechanisms through which preventive behavior (diet, body weight, and physical activity) alters cancer development, and how research findings can be translated into effective health promotion programs. Importantly, she is also addressing a major area of controversy in nutrition research, which is the application of new ways to assess dietary exposures. Her research goes beyond science, and she has participated in knowledge translation activities by developing partnerships with knowledge users to improve the delivery of evidence-based nutrition services to people with cancer and other chronic diseases.

Dr. Hannah Holscher is an Assistant Professor of Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois. She is also a member of the interdepartmental Nutritional Sciences graduate program. Over the past 2½ years, Hannah has established an independent research program that focuses on the clinical application of nutritional sciences in healthy and diseased populations with an overarching goal of improving human health through the dietary modulation of the gastrointestinal microbiome. In addition, she has been recognized for her scholarly accomplishments in terms of grant funding, honors, and awards. To date, she has garnered over $2M in internal and external grant support (~50%% as PI). Most impressively, Hannah was selected as a New Innovator in Food and Agriculture Research Award (~$600,000) from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research. Hannah has published 29 total peerreviewed publications, 10 as first-author and eight as senior/corresponding author. Her work is well-regarded by her peers and is highly cited as evidenced by her 471 citations to date and an h-index of 11 and an i10-index of 12. Of the 29 publications, 23 are directly related to human nutrition. Her three most highly cited publications (60–90 citations each), of which she is the first author, are randomized, controlled, feeding trials investigating the impact of specific probiotics or prebiotics on the human microbiota. Her fourth most cited publication is a sole author review of dietary fiber and prebiotics and the gastrointestinal microbiota in a supplement in Gut Microbes on nutrition and the microbiome. This paper been already been cited an impressive 50 times since February 2017.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Rachel Murphy and Dr. Hannah Holscher for their outstanding achievements.

As the awardees, Dr. Murphy and Dr. Holscher will receive an honorarium of 2000 Swiss Francs and a waiver of the 1800 Swiss Francs article processing fee for a manuscript accepted for publication in Nutrients.

We would like to thank all the applicants in various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee members for their evaluation of the abundant excellent applications.

Prof. Dr. Lluis Serra-Majem
Prof. Dr. Maria Luz Fernandez
Editors in Chief