Read the full story by Robin Roger in the Cornell Chronicle.

The College of Human Ecology (CHE) has received a $10 million commitment from Joan Klein Jacobs ’54 and Irwin M. Jacobs ’54, BEE ’56, to support the college’s new Center for Precision Nutrition and Health. The gift will endow the center’s executive directorship, two postdoctoral fellowships and funds to advance faculty innovation and student experiential learning – all named in honor of Joan Jacobs as a dedicated alumna of the college.

The gift will also expand the center’s portfolio of research and programs in the emerging field of precision nutrition, which delivers tailored dietary recommendations based on a person’s genetics, gut microbes and other biological, environmental and social factors. The center’s ultimate goal is to develop interventions that will improve health outcomes at both the individual and population level.

“With one of the nation’s largest and most prolific academic research and training programs in nutritional sciences, Cornell is a major driver of the research, and the translation to impact, necessary to achieve precision nutrition’s full potential for human health,” President Martha E. Pollack said. “This extraordinary gift will empower the next generation of nutritional scientists to leverage advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science to improve lives.”