{"id":1545,"date":"2023-12-20T14:54:57","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T19:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/?page_id=1545"},"modified":"2024-02-08T12:08:01","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T17:08:01","slug":"digging-into-data","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/winter-2024\/features\/digging-into-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging into data for nutrition know-how"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cynthia
Cynthia Ogden at the CDC offices in Hyattsville, Maryland.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Story by Rhea Hirshman<\/em>
\nPortraits by Stephen Voss<\/em><\/p>\n

Throughout a 30-year career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Cynthia Ogden \u201983 has distinguished herself in the fields of public health, nutritional epidemiology, obesity, and child growth. Her byline has appeared in more than 145 of the top scientific journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association<\/em> and Pediatrics<\/em>. She has led a research staff of 12 doctoral and master\u2019s-level scientists, including physicians, nutritionists, epidemiologists, and statisticians, and has lectured in her field throughout the world.<\/p>\n

Yet if one asks Ogden what her most memorable class was during her days at Trinity College, her answer might be surprising. She recalls an art course (though the religion course \u201cJob and His Friends,\u201d taught by longtime professor John Gettier, might be a close second). Ogden credits art with teaching her to do what is critical in scientific work: to pay attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember spending hours in front of paintings in the Austin Arts Center with Fine Arts Professor George Chaplin telling us, \u2018You have to look. What do you see?\u2019 \u201d Ogden says. \u201cNow, I spend hours examining survey results and trying to understand what I\u2019m looking at. Is there a pattern? Is there a better way to communicate what I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to the story of Ogden\u2019s career, it\u2019s clear that the strength of Trinity\u2019s liberal arts curriculum played a pivotal role.\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

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. She was good at math and always loved it, but she also loved art and literature. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember talking to my dad,\u201d she says, \u201ctrying to figure out what to major in because I had all these interests. I didn\u2019t want to major in anything\u2014I just wanted to keep taking classes!<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I met people from Ghana at Trinity, I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about African history or culture or politics,\u201d she continues. \u201cI got a lot from Trinity. Not just from teachers like Gettier and Chaplin but also Leslie Desmangles [religious studies, 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\u2019s a way of quantifying things. I like the patterns and numbers and being precise in my language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ogden finally decided on the interdisciplinary major of intercultural studies, writing her senior thesis on images of the mother in West African literature. After graduating, she took a job in computer programming in an insurance company\u2019s actuarial department but found the work did not suit her at all. \u201cI was not ready to stop learning.\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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\u2014while continuing to take classes in art and Africana studies\u2014she earned a master\u2019s degree and a Ph.D. in city and regional planning, with a minor in nutrition.<\/p>\n

\u201cInternational development\u2014that\u2019s what I thought I wanted to do,\u201d she says. \u201cI even considered the Peace Corps. I wanted to teach math in Africa. City and regional planning\u2014it\u2019s broader and encompasses how societies function together, how we live together in urban and rural areas, including food systems and health.\u201d<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0which focused on malnutrition among that city\u2019s young children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided that studying and analyzing information about the epidemiology of nutrition was a good place to use my math skills,\u201d she says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t enough for me just to do math in insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n

A postdoctoral year with the New York State Health Department\u2019s Nutrition Division saw Ogden researching the nutritional status of young children and analyzing county-level data on childhood obesity. That experience led to the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a two-year applied epidemiology fellowship program with the CDC.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you join EIS,\u201d she says, \u201cthey place you in any one of a number of different parts of the agency. I was placed at the National Center for Health Statistics, working on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the premier nutrition survey for the U.S. It was perfect for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Cynthia
Cynthia Ogden at the CDC offices in Hyattsville, Maryland.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s Milken Institute School of Public Health, where she has mentored dozens of students.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone in the field of obesity knows Cynthia\u2019s work,\u201d notes Craig Hales, M.D., M.P.H., a clinical reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration\u2019s Division of Diabetes, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity. \u201cShe is one of the most published scientists at the CDC. In fact, because of her enthusiasm and approach\u2014and her generosity with her time and expertise when we first worked together\u2014I switched my career trajectory from being a medical epidemiologist specializing in infectious diseases to obesity epidemiology and medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Ogden\u2019s 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. With the world\u2019s scientific community waiting for the most up-to-date news, 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. She also developed a daily summation email for the CDC director.<\/p>\n

The work was intense, at least 60 hours a week, in a field of expertise not her own. \u201cBut I am proud of having been able to learn quickly,\u201d she says, \u201cto apply my skill set to digesting and interpreting a different area of science and to do something absolutely essential at that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ogden made other, unique contributions to the COVID-19 response after realizing that the medical trucks used for NHANES\u2014which was shut down with everything else\u2014could be repurposed to support testing in areas with limited access. She worked with the D.C. Department of Forensic Science to get the trucks deployed, says Barbara Mahon, M.D., acting principal deputy director of the CDC Global Health Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cCynthia is the one-in-a-million person\u00a0who is both incredibly astute quantitatively and who also has extremely acute emotional intelligence\u00a0and concern for others,\u201d says Mahon, who worked with Ogden during the COVID-19 emergency response. \u201cThese 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. Griffith Mentoring Award from the American Statistical Association Government Statistics Section], to her transformative work\u00a0on the COVID-19 response in synthesizing emerging scientific knowledge for the highest levels of leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back at her regular CDC job, based in Hyattsville, Maryland, Ogden continues to carry out cross-disciplinary research and to give presentations at workshops, professional meetings, and universities, as well as doing media interviews. In her personal life, she also brought her scientific expertise to the board of Sidwell Friends School, where she served for nine years and where her two children were educated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I give talks, people will often comment, \u2018You really love your job!\u2019 \u201d Ogden says. \u201cAnd I do. I work with fabulous people, and I love gathering and analyzing data because of what it can teach us. The applied research I do helps us answer questions that many people care about.\u201d 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\u2014it was way back in the religion class taught by John Gettier where she first learned to sit with the hard questions, to appreciate the complexity of human life and societies throughout the ages.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrinity opened up a lot of things I didn\u2019t know anything about,\u201d she recalls. \u201cWorld history and philosophy. That\u2019s what Trinity did for me. I thought, \u2018Wow, there\u2019s so many things to learn.\u2019 There were so many moments where I said, \u2018I didn\u2019t know that!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Kathy Ogden IDP\u201990 contributed to this story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Story by Rhea Hirshman Portraits by Stephen Voss Throughout a 30-year career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Cynthia Ogden \u201983 has distinguished herself in the fields of public health, nutritional epidemiology, obesity, and child growth. 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