Kathleen Rasmussen
Kathleen M. Rasmussen,ScD, RD is the Nancy Schlegel Meinig Professor of Maternal & Child Nutrition and International Professor of Nutritional Science at Cornell. An internationally-known researcher in maternal & child nutrition, she earned her Doctorate of Science in Nutrition from Harvard. She has led research establishing that interventions to improve maternal nutritional status can increase milk volume and improve its composition, thus improving infant nutritional status. Her work shows that being overweight at conception is a risk for problems establishing/maintaining breastfeeding, and that there’s a trade-off between the needs of the pregnant/lactating mother and those of her fetus/breastfed infant. Current research is on human milk expression to meet goals. Among the awards she has received for her major contributions to pregnancy and lactation studies are the Agnes Higgins Award (APHA) and the Macy-György Award (International Society for Research on Human Milk and Lactation).
