Lara Dugas

Lara Dugas, PhD, MPH, FTOS is the AXA Chair in Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Epidemiology, hosted at the University of Cape Town and a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health, Loyola University Chicago. She completed her PhD and post-doctoral work at UCT where she studied human energy metabolism, focusing on energy expenditure measurement. In 2007 she joined Loyola University Chicago, where she was the project coordinator of METS, a large international prospective cohort study exploring the impact of diet and physical activity on NCD risk in 5 African-origin populations from Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica, Seychelles and the US. 

In 2014 she expanded this work to explore the role of the gut microbiota and intermediary metabolites, and NCD risk and in 2019 to examine the additional role of sleep behaviour, and circadian rhythms. Through her hosted Chair, she is exploring the intersection of NCDs, including obesity and type 2 diabetes, and infectious diseases in populations with a high HIV burden. More recently her work is exploring the impact of a heating climate and NCD risk among vulnerable groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, leveraging her work in South Africa and Ghana through HABVIA: Heat Adaptation Benefits for Vulnerable groups in Africa (HABIVA). HAVIA is a 3-year quasi-randomized controlled study exploring the impact of heat adaptation interventions among vulnerable African populations living in South Africa and Ghana.