Dr. Teri Hernandez is the Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship in the College of Nursing and an Associate Professor of Medicine and Nursing at the University of Colorado. Over 19 years at CU, she has developed a program of research exemplified by the execution of carefully controlled clinical studies focused on nutrition, metabolic health, and early life exposures. The goal of these studies is to illuminate ways to improve the lives of women, infants and their families using a multidisciplinary team science approach. 

Teri is a cardiac nurse by training and completed a Master’s degree at the CU College of Nursing in 2005. This was followed by focused training in glucose/lipid metabolism and pregnancy physiology through a clinical science approach. Her PhD was conferred in 2009, also through the CU College of Nursing. She has a dedicated commitment to understanding insulin resistance as both an adaptation and as pathology. 

Her research focuses on diabetes and obesity, insulin resistance, pregnancy, and fetal growth, with an emphasis on how nutrition and metabolism influence these conditions. She and her research team (Infant GOLD, Investigations in the Gestational Origins of Lifelong Development) have a program of research focused on in-utero programming influences that enhance or attenuate obesity, diabetes and CVD risk and through this platform, she is committed to training nurses and other clinical/translational scientists as high-caliber clinical investigators. Teri is a national and rising international expert in nutrition in pregnancy and gestational diabetes. 

She is an educator in the graduate school at CU, serves as Director for the Colorado Clinical and Translational Research Institute Early Life Exposures Research program, and is a Pediatric Nurse Scientist at Children’s Hospital Colorado.