Science & Medicine Pioneer
Dariush Mozaffarian
Cardiometabolic Health, Tufts University
Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist and epidemiologist, the Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and Medicine, and Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. He is also editor-in-chief of the Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter.
His research focuses on the effects of lifestyle — particularly diet — on cardiometabolic health and disease, on global impacts of suboptimal nutrition on chronic diseases, and on effectiveness of policies to improve diet and reduce disease risk. Mozaffarian has co-authored or authored more than 300 scientific publications on the dietary priorities to reduce cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity.
More recently, Mozaffarian has been collecting robust, quantitative evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of various nutrition policy approaches. “As a cardiologist, I’ve been thinking about food—and how food is missing from the health-care system—for 20 years now,” Mozaffarian said in an interview with Tufts Now on the social, public health, and fiscal repercussions of poor nutrition. “One in four dollars in the federal budget is spent on health care. One in five dollars in the entire U.S. economy is spent on healthcare, and that is only going to go up until we address food.”
Mozaffarian is a recipient of the Searle Scholar Award and is a fellow of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. He has served in numerous advisory roles including for U.S. and Canadian governments, the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations. In 2016, Thomson Reuters named him as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds.
Mozaffarian was previously a clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.