Education
A.A., Physical Education, Northeast Mississippi Community College, Booneville, MS, USA
B.S., Physical Education – K-12, Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, MS, USA
M.S., Exercise Science, West Texas A&M University, Canyon, TX, USA
Ph.D., Exercise Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
Biography
Dr. Lisa T. Jansen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition, College of Health Professions at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and an Affiliated Faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics (Section Developmental Nutrition), College of Medicine. She serves as the Associate Director of the Maternal and Early Nutrition for Optimal Growth and Development (MEND) Core at the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center, a USDA-Agricultural Research Service-funded National Human Nutrition Research Center.
In her role with the MEND Core, Dr. Jansen contributes to the scientific leadership and coordination of maternal-child nutrition research spanning pregnancy through adolescence, supporting multidisciplinary studies that integrate clinical, behavioral, and metabolic approaches to improve maternal and pediatric health outcomes.
Dr. Jansen’s research program focuses on how modifiable lifestyle factors, particularly hydration, physical activity, and dietary patterns, shape maternal cardiometabolic health during pregnancy and influence the intrauterine environment relevant to child health and development. Her work bridges clinical nutrition, exercise physiology, and metabolic adaptation, with pregnancy conceptualized as a critical window for cardiometabolic risk identification and prevention.
She completed her doctoral training at the University of Arkansas, where her dissertation examined the role of vasopressin (copeptin) signaling in glucose regulation. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School within the New Balance Childhood Obesity Prevention Center, working under the mentorship of Drs. Cara Ebbeling, PhD, LDN, and David Ludwig, MD, PhD, on controlled feeding trials and diet-metabolism interactions.
At UAMS and the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center, Dr. Jansens leads and collaborates on NIH- and USDA-funded studies examining gestational glucose regulation, maternal exercise interventions, hydration biomarkers, and the use of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) as a functional process measurement tool in pregnancy. Her research leverages longitudinal cohorts and pragmatic clinical research designs to support scalable, evidence-based strategies for maternal and pediatric health promotion.