At George Mason University, Kelly Kogan found the space to merge two growing interests—nutrition and data—into a new career direction. “My favorite part was the ability to really pursue my interests,” she said. “I’m very grateful they enabled me to do what I wanted to do.”
That direction wasn’t obvious at first. When Kogan left her two-decade D.C. law career, she didn’t yet know where she was headed. She just knew she needed change. “I wasn’t a happy lawyer,” she said. “I woke up one day and thought, I don’t want to do this for another decade.”
Food had always been a love: cooking for her family, food photography, thinking about nutrition. She followed that curiosity into an undergraduate Introduction to Nutrition class at George Mason University. “And I loved it,” she said.
One class led to another, then to the master’s program in Nutrition and Food Studies in 2021. As her interests sharpened, Kogan discovered a passion for working with data and pursued a PhD in Health Services Research, which she completed in 2023.
Today, Kogan works as a nutritionist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping guide What We Eat in America, the dietary intake survey that captures a detailed portrait of Americans’ food habits. The survey serves as a cornerstone of U.S. nutrition science, informing decades of research and major public health decisions, such as the addition of folic acid to bread products to prevent birth defects.
“This work is important,” Kogan said. “Data is what informs evidence-based policymaking. We have to know how to collect it, clean it, and analyze it to identify problems and create solutions.”
What We Eat in America is the dietary interview component of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, supported by USDA’s Food Surveys Research Group, where Kogan contributes to the data and methods that make this work possible.
Kogan’s work with the research group grew out of her dissertation at George Mason, a study of breastfeeding outcomes and food insecurity that probed how federal nutrition programs shape families’ decisions. That project opened the door to a USDA postdoctoral fellowship and ultimately to the role she holds now.
For Kogan, the shift from law to federal nutrition science wasn’t linear. George Mason gave her the room to develop a specialized focus on nutrition data, a focus that carried forward into her professional life. “You have to be incredibly focused and self-directed,” she said. “Every class project I did, I found the data and turned it into a nutrition question.”
Learn more about the Public Health PhD and Health Services Research PhD programs at the George Mason College of Public Health.