Dr Elizabeth Parks

Elizabeth Parks is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology and Department of Medicine, both in the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri in Columba, MO. She has been on the faculty since 2013 and also serves as Associate Director of the Clinical Translational Science Unit.  As an Investigator in the university’s NextGen Precision Health Initiative, her research focuses on understanding how the food we eat is processed in the body to benefit health and how it can also contribute to the progression of diseases such as obesity, pre-diabetes, and diabetes. 

The major research contributions of the Parks Lab emanate from the development of novel techniques to measure the absorption and disposal of dietary fats, carbohydrates, and proteins in humans and in animal models.  Over the past 25 years, Dr Parks has developed methods using stable isotopes, mass spectrometry, and mathematical modeling to discover how the body switches metabolism from the fasting to fed state. Her laboratory's seminal contributions have included understanding the fate of dietary sugars that can be made into fat in the liver significantly contributing to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). 

From a national service perspective, Dr Parks is a member of the American Society for Nutrition and The Obesity Society. She is a fellow of the AHA and the Obesity Society and has contributed significantly to ADA and NIH grant review panels. Her current research is discovering the mechanisms by which weight loss and exercise can lead to the resolution of NASH and diabetes.