Biography:

Dr. Smilowitz has been the IMGC’s Scientific and Strategic Development Director since April 2019 and attended the first IMGC Symposium in Napa California in 2004 as a graduate student. Dr. Smilowitz is also an Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis.  She has engaged in active collaborations with IMGC scientists and demonstrated clinical safety and efficacy for several new products either in or on their way to the marketplace.  She holds a doctoral degree in Nutritional Biology with an emphasis in Endocrinology and completed her postdoctoral fellowship in Food Science from the University of California Davis. She has a well-established career in lactation and milk science, particularly human milk and clinical nutrition.  Dr. Smilowitz has spent much of her career solving complex problems with the use of cross-disciplinary and multi-collaborative methods and currently focuses on community nutrition and health equity. She has published more than 70 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals on lactation, milk and microbiome across all life stages. As a lactation education counselor Dr. Smilowitz supports breastfeeding and researches dietary solutions that support the health of the mother-infant dyad. She regularly gives lectures on the benefits of breastfeeding and its impact on the infant gut microbiome to health-care practitioners across northern Californian hospitals, clinics and Women Infants and Children (WIC) staff and an invited guest lecturer for various undergraduate and graduate-level courses in lactation, microbiology, infant-maternal nutrition, nutrition and food science at University of California Davis. Her bibliography is publicly available here.