A former University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher, Diane Birt,
Ph.D., will make a lecture presentation at 9 a.m., March 28 at the
92nd annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research in New
Orleans. The AACR is made up of more than 17,000 laboratory and clinical
cancer researchers in the United States, Canada and more than 60 foreign
countries.
Dr. Birt’s lecture B the sixth AACR-DeWitt S. Goodman Lecture — is
titled, “Molecular and Hormonal Mechanisms for Dietary Energy Restriction
Prevention of Skin Cancer.” The AACR meeting will be held March 24 to 28.
To be selected to deliver this lecture is considered a great honor for
Dr. Birt, who was a faculty member at the Eppley Institute for Research
in Cancer and Allied Diseases at UNMC from 1976 to 1997. She started as
an assistant professor and eventually gained full professor status. Prior
to joining the Eppley Institute her research focused on diet and aging,
but at Eppley, her research looked at the effects of diet on cancer.
The cross-collaboration between researchers at the Eppley Institute
made her transition to cancer research easy, Dr. Birt said, and she credits
the Eppley Institute with getting her started with the research that helped
her earn this prestigious recognition from AACR.
“The research I did during my 21 years at the Eppley Institute provided
the basis for this recognition,” Dr. Birt said. “I would have never gotten
into cancer research had I not been recruited by the Eppley Institute.”
She is currently professor and chair of the Department of Food Science
and Human Nutrition and director of the Center for Designing Foods to Improve
Nutrition at Iowa State University.
Birt is being recognized for her novel work in the areas of nutrition
and chemoprevention. Using a number of animal cancer models, she has advanced
the understanding of the mechanisms by which diet can influence cancer
development. By providing concrete mechanistic information on the effects
of dietary energy restriction, she contributed significantly to the understanding
of the relationship between diet and reduction of carcinogenesis. It is
believed that ultimately this work could have a major impact on the design
of chemopreventive measures for many human cancers.
The AACR-DeWitt S. Goodman Lectureship acknowledges outstanding work
in the fields of nutrition and cancer and cancer prevention. This area
of study has become very important because of the strong epidemiological
evidence of the role of dietary factors in human cancer risk. The lecture
was established in memory of Dr. DeWitt S. Goodman, an international leader
in the field of nutrition and cancer and cancer prevention.
For more information about the 92nd AACR Annual Meeting, and to view
the preliminary program, please visit the AACR website at www.aacr.org.