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The ����ֱ�� held its first Nutrition Symposium on Saturday April 21, 2018. The free event was the result of a collaboration between ����ֱ��'s undergraduate Nutrition degree program and its online graduate degree program in Applied Nutrition. Nearly 50 people attended, both in person at ����ֱ��’s Innovation Hall and online. Many of the attendees were students.

“The symposium gave me the opportunity to see some of the different avenues you can take in the nutrition field that I wasn’t aware of before,” said Erica Woods ’19, a Medical Biology student with a minor in Nutrition.

The event featured dynamic speakers with incredible expertise, including Carrie Aprik, M.S., RD, CSSD, Team USA dietitian for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. Aprik recently returned from the Winter Olympics after supporting the Gold Medal winning U.S. Women's Hockey Team.

“It was very inspiring to hear from Carrie Aprik about her experiences with the Winter Olympics in South Korea,” said Alaina Duchin ’20, a ����ֱ�� Nutrition student. “There’s so much that goes into fueling the athletes that people don’t always think about.”

Medical Biology major and Nutrition minor Meagan Keohane ’19 commented, “Listening to Carrie speak about her experience in sports nutrition made me realize that understanding nutrition is about more than just food, and that a lot of my classes can be applied to good nutrition.”  

Joining Aprik was Angelina Moore Maia, Ph.D., RD, LD. Maia is the program director in the Dietetics and Nutrition Program in the Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is a behavioral nutritionist and has been a practicing dietitian for nearly 17 years, working in both Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. She became a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers in 2016.

Symposium attendees also heard from Megan Landry, B.S.N., MHA. Landry works as the program manager for Health Informatics in the ����ֱ�� College of Graduate and Professional Studies for the ����ֱ��. Her passion for Health Informatics is a direct result of her work in emergency/critical care nursing and clinical informatics. She worked in various Maine hospitals as both a critical care and emergency room nurse at the beginning of her professional career. Her nursing career taught her that at the heart of all care is a need for systems that are designed for the entire care team - which includes the patient and their support system. With this transition came jobs as a clinical analyst and informatics manager at Maine’s largest healthcare organizations. Education has always been a common thread of her career, and she has taught health care informatics at all levels of higher education. Now her days are spent developing a team of faculty who bring their expertise and wisdom the next generation of informaticists.

To learn more about the ����ֱ��’s Westbrook College of Health Professions visit

To learn more about the College of Graduate and Professional studies, visit

To apply, visit