The act of eating is typically enjoyable and always necessary. It is an act that every living creature must perform to sustain itself within its environment and we humans are no different.

Actually, scratch that. There are in fact many differences in what we choose to eat and how we choose to eat it.

At Penn State’s Metabolic Kitchen and Children’s Eating Behavior Lab, Dr. Kathleen Keller and her team are dedicated to understanding why children make the food choices that they do, in hopes of identifying strategies to improve these choices. The lab fosters a wide variety of contributors whose interdisciplinary skills make the place a unique cross section of the people involved with health sciences at Penn State.

The director and leader of the lab, Dr. Kathleen Keller was born in the small, rural town of Marion, Indiana. Kathleen was an athlete in high school and was interested in the sciences.

Wanting to explore the world and go to an area that was a little bigger and more diverse than her hometown, she decided to attend Marquette in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

While she had originally wanted to become a traditional medical doctor, after her junior year she began questioning that path and instead decided to graduate with a degree in biology and took a year off to manage a French Bakery. It was there where she started putting together that her passions for food and science could be merged into one if she pursued graduate studies in nutrition.

She was accepted to a graduate program in Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey. However, there was a small caveat to how nutrition was mostly being researched at the time. Many of the labs in the program were using rats, mice, or other animals to study the effects of diet on the body. Unfortunately,  and as Dr. Keller put it, “decapitating rats was not for me.”

After rotating through a few labs, she found an opportunity to work in the Food Science department with Dr. Beverly Tepper.  There developed her passion for studying individual differences in children’s eating behaviors. This lab would become the template for her own lab here at Penn State.

While there are various philosophies when it comes to thinking of nutrition, Dr. Keller and her team come from a food first perspective. This means that in the lab, researchers view food as inextricably linked to pleasure and cultural connections more so than simply to satiate hunger.

There are many things that people associate with a successful career in academia. Prestige. Grant funding. Comfort. But when asked what dream success looks like in Dr. Keller’s lab, it is simply helping others in their journey to become the best versions of themselves.