ADRIANA COLETTA

Adriana Coletta earned her BS in Nutrition from the Pennsylvania State University (State College, PA), then pursued an MS in Nutrition with minor in Exercise Science from the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN). Dr. Coletta stayed at the University of Tennessee for an additional year to complete a Dietetic Internship, then  worked full time as a Pediatric Dietitian at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center (Baltimore, MD). This experience confirmed her interest in understanding how novel nutrition and exercise strategies can be used to positively impact health outcomes in clinical populations, which inspired her to return to school full-time to pursue a PhD in Kinesiology at Texas A&M University (College Station, TX) under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Kreider. Dr. Coletta's training experiences encompassed specialization in exercise physiology with additional training in genetics, which led to her interest in cancer research. As such she pursued postdoctoral training in cancer prevention and survivorship research, along with training in behavioral science and exercise oncology under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Basen-Engquist and Dr. Susan Gilchrist at MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX).

Dr. Coletta is dually appointed with the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program, and the Department of Health and Kinesiology at the University of Utah. The mission of her research program is to develop exercise and nutrition strategies that help individuals affected by cancer maintain and/or improve independence and quality of life throughout their cancer care and beyond, while also leveraging these strategies to complement cancer treatment in an effort to deliver a cancer-free frontier.