Erikka Loftfield PhD, MPH

Erikka Loftfield earned an M.P.H. in chronic disease epidemiology in 2012 and a Ph.D. in epidemiology in 2015, both from Yale University. She joined DCEG in 2013 through the Yale University-NCI Partnership Training Program. In 2015 she transitioned to a postdoctoral fellowship and in 2016 was promoted to research fellow. She was selected as an Earl Stadtman tenure-track investigator in the Metabolic Epidemiology Branch (MEB) and an NIH Distinguished Scholar in 2020.

Dr. Loftfield has received numerous awards for her work, including the NIH and DCEG Fellows Award for Research Excellence, the NCI Director’s Intramural Innovation Award, the Office of Dietary Supplements Research Scholars Program Award, and the DCEG Outstanding Research Paper by a Fellow.

Dr. Loftfield’s research focuses on the interplay between diet, metabolism, the microbiome, and genetics and their effects on cancer risk. Her integrative research program leverages developing technologies to improve dietary assessment and gain insights into diet-cancer associations. As a fellow, Dr. Loftfield studied the relationship between coffee drinking and the risk of cancer and mortality utilizing data from prospective cohort studies and genetic and metabolomic approaches. She parlayed findings from this work into novel questions to assess coffee consumption for the NCI Diet History Questionnaire III.