Dr. Peterson obtained her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 2011, working on the physics of the Big Bang. Thereafter, she changed disciplines and took up an NIH T32 obesity postdoctoral fellowship in nutrition and metabolism at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. At Pennington, she trained under Dr. Eric Ravussin, a world expert in energy metabolism and in diabetes and obesity clinical trials. During this time, she worked on several controlled lifestyle intervention trials, ranging from using resistant starch to mitigate prediabetes, to overeating and caloric restriction, to using whole-body hypoxia to reduce insulin resistance. Dr. Peterson also served as a Visiting Scholar in the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she trained in the laboratory of Dr. Frank Scheer, a world expert in circadian rhythms in humans.
Dr. Peterson has received a KL2 Career Development Fellowship, an Early-Career Research Grant from The Obesity Society (top 1%), a Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center Roadmap Scholars Fellowship, and a Marshall Scholarship. In addition, she holds four master’s degrees: clinical research (Tulane University, 2015), physics (Harvard University, 2011), science communication (Imperial College London, 2004), and applied mathematics & theoretical physics (University of Cambridge, 2003).
