Meet Our Team

Principal Investigator

Alison Gernand is an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State. She is a registered dietitian with a Master of Public Health from the University of Texas School of Public Health and a Ph.D. in human nutrition and international health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

Gernand has a broad background in maternal and child nutrition, with specific training and expertise that spans public health/epidemiology, micronutrients, pregnancy, plasma volume, and the placenta. Her research is primarily focused on the role of maternal micronutrient status in placental development, fetal growth, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. She has worked with field trials of prenatal micronutrient supplementation in low-income countries and conducts epidemiologic research examining fetal and placental growth, placental pathologies, and adverse pregnancy outcomes in large pregnancy cohorts. 

Her work in low-resource settings has led to an interest in developing simple tools for assessing the placenta and plasma volume, making these measurements more accessible in pregnancy research. She has worked directly in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Ghana, and Uganda and collaborated on studies in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Australia.