Steven Zeisel

Steven H. Zeisel is an American academic. He is Professor Emeritus in Nutrition and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Education Zeisel earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, was a resident in pediatrics at Yale University from 1975 to 1977, and earned his Ph.D. in nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

Career Zeisel is the Kenan Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of the UNC's Nutrition Research Institute at the newly formed North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, North Carolina and the UNC Nutrition Obesity Research Center.

He served as chair of the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1990 to 2005. He was also the director UNC Human Clinical Nutrition Research Center and the director UNC Center for Excellence in Children's Nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He is currently a member of the American Society for Nutrition, the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, the American College of Nutrition and the Society for Pediatric Research, among others.

He has served on the Annual Review of Nutrition's editorial committee and continues to serve on the FASEB Journal editorial board. Zeisel is a member of the World Cancer Research Fund's Expert Panel on “Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective.” He serves as the principal investigator on multiple federally funded research projects that focus on human requirements for choline and the effects of this nutrient on brain development. He has authored more than 280 scientific publications.

He has been criticized for accepting funding from the Egg Board for his studies of choline, a nutrient that eggs contain high amounts of.

Selected publications