LINDSAY ALLEN
Director, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Western Human Nutrition Research Center (WHNRC) Research Professor, Department of Nutrition University of California, DavisPHOTO BY MAYUMI ACOSTA PHOTOGRAPHYLindsay Allen landed in California from England in 1969, following her then partner, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. She had received a bachelor’s degree in food science and nutrition two years earlier and then worked in a human nutrition lab at the University of Cambridge. Allen began working as a technician in the UC Davis food science lab of Frances Zeman, who suggested that she should pursue a PhD. “I never considered getting a PhD or having an academic career, because few people in the U.K. went to graduate school, which was incredibly specialized there,” says Allen, who now serves as the director of the US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service’s (ARS) Western Human Nutrition Research Center in California.
Allen enjoyed the coursework and found that her academic background—a science-focused curriculum of chemistry, biology, and nutrition courses in high school and during university in England—had prepared her well for graduate school.
For her thesis, Allen worked with a rat model to understand how protein deficiency during pregnancy affected female animals and their offspring. “At the time, there was a lot of interest in protein deficiency as a major cause of human malnutrition,” she says. Compared to the progeny of control rats that were not deficient in protein intake during gestation, the progeny of deficient animals had permanent changes in their body composition and in kidney development, Allen found. She is quick to point out that our knowledge of malnutrition has evolved significantly since her ...
