Photo courtesy of Natural Products Insider
Throwback to Women’s History Month 2022!
In honor of Women’s History Month, the editorial team at Natural Products Insider tapped me to profile a woman in the natural products industry worthy of being celebrated. My pick? Yasmeen Elie-Nkrumah, Ph.D.
Dr. Elie-Nkrumah and I met at an industry conference and immediately hit it off. We’d chatted a bit about her work as the global director of R&D for external research at bioscience company ChromaDex. However, it was only when we sat down for our interview that I discovered the breadth of experiences that led Elie-Nkrumah to her role in propelling nutrition science.
So, what does Dr. Elie-Nkrumah do?
Currently leading an interdisciplinary, cross-functional team advancing the science of NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), it is under Nkrumah-Elie’s leadership that ChromaDex has grown its external research program to more than 240 material transfer agreements and relationships with external investigators across 33 countries. The program’s goal, she says, is “to help propel science”—and that’s precisely what she’s done across her career.
How’d she get started in nutrition science?
As a student at Florida A&M University (go, Rattlers!), Yasmeen wondered how food actually gets to one’s plate, and refocused her studies on biological and agricultural engineering. A four-month sojourn to her family’s ancestral home in Ghana was spent studying under a shaman, learning about traditional botanical medicines. After earning her doctorate, Nkrumah-Elie began to wonder how populations could use nutrition to offset being exposed to so many chemical compounds in their environments. Toxicology became her focus.
Read the rest of this article at Natural Product Insider.