Rate My Professor Krista Varady

Krista Varady, PhD, is a Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois Chicago. She earned a BS in Nutrition and Dietetics from the University of Guelph in 2002, a PhD in Human Nutrition from McGill University in 2006, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley from 2006 to 2008. Her research focuses on the efficacy of intermittent fasting for weight loss and metabolic disease reduction in people with obesity. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications on this topic and is the author of two books for the general public, The Every Other Day Diet and The Fastest Diet. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the International Life Sciences Institute, and the University of Illinois. She serves as director of the Human Nutrition Research Center at UIC.

Varady has received several honors, including the 2023 UIC Distinguished Researcher of the Year Award in Clinical Sciences, the 2019 Researcher of the Year Award from the College of Applied Health Sciences at UIC, the 2017 Mead Johnson Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Nutrition, and the 2015 Malaspina Scholar Award from the International Life Sciences Institute. She has secured multiple NIH grants as principal investigator or multiple principal investigator on studies examining alternate-day fasting combined with exercise for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, time-restricted eating versus calorie restriction, and effects on colorectal cancer risk markers. As one of the first researchers to study intermittent fasting in humans, her contributions have advanced understanding of its safety and metabolic benefits.