Journal of Nutrition and Health Sciences

Victoria J. Vieira-Potter, PhD obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Chemistry from Wheaton College (Norton, MA) in 2001. She completed her Master’s degree in Nutrition at the University of New Hampshire in 2004. Her Master’s thesis was “Insulin Resistance: A Possible Risk Factor for Atopy and Asthma Development in Women”. She has a doctorate degree in Nutrition from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she studied the anti-inflammatory effect of exercise using both human and animal models.  Her dissertation title was "Anti-inflammatory Effects of Cardiovascular Exercise: Role of Visceral Adipose Tissue". From 2009-2012 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the JM-USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in the Obesity and Metabolism Laboratory where she studied the metabolic effects of estrogen loss in rodents with a primary focus on the adipose tissue. Since August 2012, Dr. Vieira-Potter joined the faculty of the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology at the University of Missouri as an Assistant Professor of Nutrition. She is currently the PI of the PhIT-FAT (Physiological and Immunological Techniques assessing the Function of Adipose Tissue) laboratory and teaches an upper level undergraduate/graduate course in Nutrition. 

My research focuses on how behavioral (e.g., exercise, consumption of an HFD) and biological (e.g., aging, loss of ovarian hormone production, intrinsic aerobic fitness) factors affect metabolic disease pathogenesis, in part via alterations in WAT immune cell content and physiology. Specific areas of interest include:

• The relationship between white adipose tissue (WAT) inflammation and systemic metabolic function (e.g., insulin resistance and fatty liver)
• How diet and exercise affect body composition and WAT inflammation
• How ovariectomy (OVX, removal of the ovaries) in rodents affects WAT metabolic function, insulin sensitivity, physical activity, and energy expenditure
•  How low and high running capacity rats (i.e., LCR, HCR, respectively) differentially respond to OVX