Academic Credentials
  • Dr.P.H., Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 1995
  • M.B.A., Business Administration, DePaul University, 1991
  • M.P.H., Public Health, Yale University, 1985
  • B.A., Biology, Whitman College, 1982
Professional Affiliations
  • American Society for Nutrition
  • American Board of Industrial Hygiene
  • American Public Health Association
  • International Society of Exposure Analysis
  • Society for Risk Analysis

Dr. Tran has more than 20 years of experience in exposure and risk assessment. She has extensive experience in evaluating the safety of foods and food ingredients, additives and contaminants, feed additives, cosmetics and consumer care products. 

Dr. Tran has provided technical support and prepared a variety of reports and submissions to regulatory authorities including Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) notifications, food contact notifications (FCN), food and color additive petitions (FAP and CAP) to the FDA and food additive submissions to Health Canada, JECFA, and EFSA. Dr. Tran also has extensive experience in conducting scientific review for the substantiation of health claims. She has developed regulatory strategies for FDA-regulated products in support of product development and claims, pre-market approval and product defense.

Dr. Tran has extensive experience dietary exposure assessment and public health risk modeling. She has successfully applied risk apportionment models to evaluate contribution of dietary and lifestyle risk factors to diseases, such as dietary cholesterol and coronary heart diseases. She has developed systematic methods of evaluating beneficial effects of food and food ingredients for substantiation of health claims and developed models to quantify health benefits of GM crops. Dr. Tran has also worked extensively on risk ranking methodologies for a wide range of risk management purposes. Her work in the risk ranking arena has included the development of tools to prioritize food risks (both chemical and microbial), environmental health risk ranking framework for military deployments, risk based site selection model to prioritize U.S pharmaceutical manufacturing sites for cGMP inspection, and exposure and risk screening methodologies for consumer personal care products. Complementary to her risk assessment work, Dr. Tran also led the development of the peer review procedures for food safety risk assessments for FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN).