THRIVING
April 2025
iTHRIV Scholar Alumnus Making an Impact with Food Choice Research on Health Outcomes
Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, PhD is using her experiences in the iTHRIV Scholars Program and her passion for understanding food motivation and addiction behaviors to drive her success! Dr. DiFeliceantonio is an assistant professor and interim co-director of the Center for Health Behaviors Research at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, and leader of the DiFeliceantonio Neuropsychology of Nutrition (DONNUT) Lab at Virginia Tech. She leads research focused on understanding the basic mechanisms of food choice by both isolating the properties of foods in our modern food environment to evaluate their effects on physiology, brain function, and brain-physiology interaction and trying to understand how individual differences in response to these food properties can confer risk or benefit for disease outcomes. She participated in the iTHRIV Scholars Program 2020-2022.
Dr. DiFeliceantonio’s interest in reward learning and motivation began while earning her bachelor's degree in psychology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. This passion led her to pursue a master's degree and doctorate in biopsychology from the University of Michigan, where she studied how opioids affect motivation in animal models. During her postdoctoral training at Yale University and the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Germany, she focused on the role of post-ingestive dopamine signaling in eating behavior and food choices. Her dedication to research grew further during her early career as a faculty member at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech, where she was mentored by Warren Bickel, PhD.
Since graduating from the iTHRIV Scholars Program, Dr. DiFeliceantonio has earned multiple research awards, including a Seale Innovation Grant in 2025 and over $2.4M in extramural funding from the National Institutes of Health. Her current NICHD funded R21 aims to establish proof-of-concept for altered reward processing in response to ultra-processed foods. This research investigates how ultra-processed foods affect brain response, energy intake, and executive function in adolescents and young adults.
Dr. DiFeliceantonio’s first NIDDK-funded R01 examines the factors driving consumption of ultra-processed foods, which is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, various cancers, cardiovascular disease, and overall increased mortality. Uncovering the basic mechanisms of why these foods are so rewarding and overconsumed is essential to develop strategies to improve health and reduce the disease burden driven by consumption of these foods. To address this, Dr. DiFeliceantonio’s team is integrating metabolic, neural, and behavioral measures with advanced predictive modeling to uncover key factors that drive ultra-processed food reward in humans.
Her most recent NIDDK-funded R01 seeks to bridge the translational gap between animal studies and human research in understanding the neurobiology of food reward learning by recording neurotransmitter fluctuations in the human brain during food consumption. This ongoing research will provide crucial insights into the relationship between brain mechanisms of food reward and peripheral markers of metabolic health and disease, laying the groundwork for more comprehensive studies in the future. “Alex’s truly impactful research is changing the way we think about health and nutrition. Our health and well-being will be better because of what she is discovering,” said Dr. Jason Papin, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia and Director of the iTHRIV Scholars Program.
“Dr. DiFeliceantonio is a nationally recognized emerging leader in the science of food choice and its impact on health, including the potentially addictive properties of ultra-processed foods that have become so ubiquitous in our society. Her work has been featured nationally in major media as among the most impactful in this important area of chronic disease and health research, including her identification of the new class of glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists on maladaptive behaviors such as alcohol consumption. When we decided to launch the FBRI Center for Health Behaviors Research, we immediately recognized that Dr. DiFeliceantonio would be a great fit for our increasing emphasis on this important contemporary area of health science and she already has had major impact. The iTHRIV Scholars Program has been especially helpful to her career advancement as she has, in a short time, caught the attention of the translational health communities at VTC, UVA and nationwide as well as securing independent NIH funding for her innovative research program,” said Dr. Michael Friedlander, the Executive Director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and Virginia Tech’s Vice President for Health Sciences and Technology.
