Megan Hetherington-Rauth, Ph.D., joined the Champalimaud Foundation in September of 2025 as a Staff Scientist. Dr. Hetherington-Rauth received her PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Arizona, USA in 2018, where she studied how adiposity, fat distribution, metabolic health, and bone development interact during critical growth periods in girls. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Human Kinetics in Portugal, focusing on body composition assessment techniques and the interplay of body composition, physical activity, and metabolic health across the lifespan, including in athletes and individuals with type 2 diabetes. She later joined the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, USA, contributing to multicenter studies on older adults that examined how body composition and metabolomic biomarkers relate to functional outcomes, and how physical activity may modify these associations.

Dr. Hetherington-Rauth’s current research investigates factors driving changes in body composition and physical decline with aging, with a particular emphasis on cancer patients and survivors. She is especially interested in applying novel assessment techniques for sarcopenia and osteoporosis, including D3-creatine muscle mass, opportunistic CT imaging, and metabolic biomarkers.