Digging into data for nutrition know-how

疾病预防控制中心专家辛西娅·奥格登83年通过文科教育获得学分

Story by Rhea Hirshman
Portraits by Stephen Voss

在疾病控制和预防中心的30年职业生涯中, 辛西娅·奥格登83年在公共卫生领域表现出色, nutritional epidemiology, obesity, and child growth. 她的署名出现在超过145种顶级科学期刊上，包括《博彩平台网址大全》杂志 Journal of the American Medical Association and Pediatrics. 她领导了12名博士和硕士级别的科学家, including physicians, nutritionists, epidemiologists, and statisticians, and has lectured in her field throughout the world.

然而，如果有人问奥格登，她在博彩平台网址大全最难忘的一节课是什么, her answer might be surprising. 她回忆起一门艺术课程(尽管是宗教课程“约伯和他的朋友们”),” taught by longtime professor John Gettier, might be a close second). 奥格登认为，艺术教会了她在科学工作中至关重要的一点:集中注意力.

“I remember spending hours in front of paintings in the Austin Arts Center with Fine Arts Professor George Chaplin telling us, ‘You have to look. What do you see?’ ” Ogden says. “现在，我花几个小时检查调查结果，试图理解我看到的是什么. Is there a pattern? Is there a better way to communicate what I’m doing? Is my scientific paper saying what I want it to say? What is the story? In both art and science, you are always telling a story.”

When it comes to the story of Ogden’s career, 很明显，博彩平台网址大全文科课程的优势发挥了关键作用. The College offered an education that taught the budding scientist to think broadly and critically, a skill that became particularly relevant in the kind of unscripted moments that came with the advent of a novel coronavirus spreading in a defenseless human population of nearly 7.9 billion.

As an undergraduate, Ogden was able to explore a wide range of interests, so much so that when the time came for her to declare a major, she found herself in a bit of a quandary. 她数学很好，一直很喜欢数学，但她也喜欢艺术和文学. Her childhood included poetry readings with her father, poet and beloved Trinity English professor Hugh Ogden, and exploring art museums with her mother. When she arrived at Trinity, she met students hailing from as far away as West Africa, sparking more inquisitiveness.

“I remember talking to my dad,” she says, “我想弄清楚该主修什么，因为我有这么多兴趣. 我不想主修任何专业——我只想继续上课!

“When I met people from Ghana at Trinity, 我意识到我对非洲的历史、文化和政治一无所知,” she continues. “I got a lot from Trinity. 不仅是格蒂埃和卓别林这样的老师，还有莱斯利·德斯曼格斯(Leslie Desmangles)[宗教研究], international studies], Sonia Lee [language and culture studies], and Jim Miller [English, American studies]. I was also introduced to statistics. I liked it because it’s a way of quantifying things. 我喜欢图案和数字，喜欢语言的精确.”

奥格登最终选择了跨文化研究这个跨学科专业, 她的毕业论文是关于西非文学中母亲的形象. After graduating, she took a job in computer programming in an insurance company’s actuarial department but found the work did not suit her at all. “I was not ready to stop learning.” she says.

After less than a year in insurance, she applied to five graduate schools and was accepted to all of them; she chose Cornell University. Focusing on international development—while continuing to take classes in art and Africana studies—she earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in city and regional planning, with a minor in nutrition.

“国际发展——这就是我想做的，”她说. “I even considered the Peace Corps. I wanted to teach math in Africa. 城市和区域规划——范围更广，包括社会如何共同运作, how we live together in urban and rural areas, including food systems and health.”

Her years at Cornell were punctuated by an internship in Rome with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), where she worked as an international nutrition consultant, and travel to Kigali, Rwanda, just a few months before the genocide, to research her dissertation, 它关注的是该市儿童的营养不良.

“I decided that studying and analyzing information about the epidemiology of nutrition was a good place to use my math skills,” she says. “It wasn’t enough for me just to do math in insurance.”

A postdoctoral year with the New York State Health Department’s Nutrition Division saw Ogden researching the nutritional status of young children and analyzing county-level data on childhood obesity. 这一经历造就了流行病情报局(EIS), 在疾控中心参加了为期两年的应用流行病学奖学金项目.

“When you join EIS,” she says, 他们会把你安排在该机构不同部门中的任何一个. I was placed at the National Center for Health Statistics, 开展全国健康和营养检查调查(NHANES), the premier nutrition survey for the U.S. It was perfect for me.”

She has been with the CDC ever since. Now an internationally recognized expert, she is a branch chief in the division that operates NHANES. She also teaches nutritional epidemiology and the epidemiology of obesity at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, where she has mentored dozens of students.

“肥胖领域的任何人都知道辛西娅的工作，”克雷格·黑尔斯(Craig Hales)博士说.D., M.P.H., 他是美国食品和药物管理局糖尿病部门的临床审查员, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity. “She is one of the most published scientists at the CDC. In fact, because of her enthusiasm and approach—and her generosity with her time and expertise when we first worked together—I switched my career trajectory from being a medical epidemiologist specializing in infectious diseases to obesity epidemiology and medicine.”

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Ogden’s expansive liberal arts background showed its usefulness and power. With the virus spreading, Ogden was called to step away from the relative ease of her known work to deploy to the CDC Office of Readiness and Response. 全世界的科学界都在等待最新的消息, she led a service for CDC leaders in which a team of scientists scoured emerging scientific information daily to pull together summaries of the most important newly released studies. 她还为疾控中心主任制定了每日总结电子邮件.

她的工作很紧张，每周至少工作60个小时，而且是在一个不属于她自己的专业领域. “But I am proud of having been able to learn quickly,” she says, “to apply my skill set to digesting and interpreting a different area of science and to do something absolutely essential at that moment.”

Ogden made other, unique contributions to the COVID-19 response after realizing that the medical trucks used for NHANES—which was shut down with everything else—could be repurposed to support testing in areas with limited access. She worked with the D.C. 法医科学部的芭芭拉·马洪(Barbara Mahon)说，他们需要部署卡车.D.他是美国疾病控制与预防中心全球卫生中心代理首席副主任.

“Cynthia is the one-in-a-million person who is both incredibly astute quantitatively and who also has extremely acute emotional intelligence and concern for others,” says Mahon, who worked with Ogden during the COVID-19 emergency response. “These qualities have driven her whole career, from the teaching in analytic thinking that led to her receiving a national award for mentorship in quantitative sciences [the Jeanne E. 美国统计协会政府统计组格里菲斯指导奖, to her transformative work on the COVID-19 response in synthesizing emerging scientific knowledge for the highest levels of leadership.”

Back at her regular CDC job, based in Hyattsville, Maryland, 奥格登继续进行跨学科研究，并在研讨会上发表演讲, professional meetings, and universities, as well as doing media interviews. In her personal life, 她还把她的科学专业知识带到了西德维尔朋友学校的董事会, 她在那里服役九年，她的两个孩子在那里接受教育.

“当我发表演讲时，人们经常会说，‘你真的很热爱你的工作!’ ” Ogden says. “And I do. I work with fabulous people, and I love gathering and analyzing data because of what it can teach us. 我所做的应用研究帮助我们回答了许多人关心的问题.” Those include questions raised by disparities in obesity throughout the country and by the significant increase over the past four decades in U.S. obesity rates among adults (from 15 percent to 42 percent) and among children (from 5 percent to 20 percent). They are questions Ogden finds herself well prepared to accommodate—it was way back in the religion class taught by John Gettier where she first learned to sit with the hard questions, 欣赏人类生活和社会的复杂性.

“博彩平台网址大全让我了解了很多我以前一无所知的东西，”她回忆道. “World history and philosophy. That’s what Trinity did for me. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s so many things to learn.“有很多时候我说，‘我不知道!’ ”

Kathy Ogden IDP’90 contributed to this story.