Dr. Maret G. Traber, Ph.D.
Oregon State University, Professor Emeritus
Contact Information
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/faculty-staff/maret-traber
maret.traber@oregonstate.edu
Research Focus:
Maret G. Traber, Ph.D., Ava Helen Pauling Professor Emeritus
Humans require vitamin E, but its impact and function in the body is less well known as compared to other nutrients central to human health. Prof. Traber has been investigating what controls human tissue vitamin E concentrations. She has been a pioneer in developing new methodologies using state-of-the-art techniques. The outcomes from her lab caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of the mechanisms regulating vitamin E in humans. Not only did she assess vitamin E pharmacokinetics using intravenous deuterium-labeled alpha-tocopherol, but her lab was the first to accurately measure vitamin E absorption from the diet. She and her colleagues also studied the antioxidant function of vitamin E in humans, demonstrating that plasma vitamin E kinetics were faster during exercise than at rest, and showing that generation of radicals during endurance exercise consumed vitamin E. They also found that cigarette smokers also had faster plasma vitamin E disappearance that could be mitigated by the administration of vitamin C. Her lab has also developed the zebrafish embryo as a model to understand molecular and metabolic impacts of vitamin E deficiency in vertebrates. These studies promise to answer the question, why is vitamin E required for life?
Traber has a long history of scholarship and service to the field of free radical research. She was the Ava Helen Pauling Professor in the Linus Pauling Institute (LPI) and the College of Health at Oregon State University (OSU). She was chair of OSU's Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects for 8 years. She received her undergraduate and graduate (PhD) degrees in Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, CA. She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Redox Biology, Journal of Nutrition and Free Radical Biology & Medicine (FRBM); she is a member of the FRBM ethics committee. Dr. Traber served on the Institute of Medicine’s Panel on Dietary Antioxidants to develop the 2000 Dietary Requirements for vitamins C and E, selenium and carotenoids. She has been a PI on various NIH and USDA-sponsored research projects to evaluate vitamin E pharmacokinetics, function, and metabolism, as well as to assess markers of oxidative stress.
Key Words:
Vitamin E
Antioxidants
Human Nutrition
Types of Clinical Trials Offered:
Pilot studies and feasibility studies
Cross sectional studies
Randomized clinical trials
Cross-over design studies
Publications:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Tnop9NIAAAAJ
