Dr. Chilton is passionate about providing solutions to overcome physical and emotional suffering so that people can live better, more joyful lives. He is a successful innovator in a wide range of areas including an academic professor (with over 140 scientific publications), an entrepreneur (starting several companies and one non-profit organization), and an inventor (holding over 25 patents). Dr. Chilton is widely recognized in academia and industry for his work on nutrition in the context of variation in the human genome and has been a pioneer in the areas of personalized or precision nutrition and wellness. Dr. Chilton has over 30 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Specifically, Dr. Chilton’s work examines how genetic and epigenetic variations interact with human diets (especially the modern Western diet) to drive inflammation and inflammatory disorders (including cardiovascular disease and cancer), as well as psychiatric/developmental disorders (ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and depression). These precision-, individualized- and population-based research approaches provide a wide range of opportunities to benefit humans that include: 1) providing a long-sought pathogenetic mechanism that underscores the different biologic behavior of inflammatory diseases in different racial/ethnic populations; 2) discovering new biomarkers of disease aggressiveness for early diagnostic and therapeutic intervention; 3) revealing new therapeutic strategies to affect disease aggressiveness using precision gene-based dietary, wellness and/or pharmacologic interventions; and 4) creating therapeutic foods and supplements that optimize immune system and brain development for different populations around the world. Dr. Chilton has won numerous awards for this work, including the Alumni Achievement Award at Western Carolina University, the Denham Harmon Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the American College for Advancement of Medicine and the 2016 Established Investigator Award at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
