Abby G. Ershow, Sc.D., R.D., FAHA, is a Senior Nutrition Scientist in the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS). At ODS her work presently focuses on issues of iodine nutritional status and on development of special component databases for iodine, purines, and other dietary constituents.
Before coming to ODS in December 2014, Dr. Ershow served as an Extramural Program Officer (Nutrition) at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute from 1989 to 2014. Prior to that, she was a Staff Fellow in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Program of the National Cancer Institute from 1982 to 1989. She completed a detail assignment as a Visiting Analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2007.Dr. Ershow received certificates in strategic planning (2011) and performance measure development (2013) from the Balanced Scorecard Institute in Cary, NC. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) and she is a Registered Dietitian (RD) and Maryland-licensed Dietitian (LD). She is the author or coauthor of 9 book chapters and more than 75 peer-reviewed articles and monographs and was a coordinating editor for “Well-Controlled Diet Studies in Humans: A Practical Guide to Design and Management,” the only full-length text on conducting controlled diet studies in humans.
Dr. Ershow’s areas of interest include iodine nutrition, maternal and child health, cardiovascular nutrition, exercise physiology, preventive medicine, vascular biology, public health, nutritional epidemiology, nutrition and developmental disabilities, food chemistry and food composition, and metrics for evaluation of program effectiveness. Other longstanding interest areas include heart failure, diabetes, obesity, peripheral arterial disease, chronic kidney disease, and the use of biomedical engineering approaches to address nutrition research issues.
Dr. Ershow received her B.A. in biological sciences (physiology) from Cornell University in 1973; her Sc.D. in nutrition, physiology, and biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1979; and the Certificate in Public Leadership from the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, in 2006.