Jonathan Bennett, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the Shepherd Research Lab and Chair of the International Society for Clinical Densitometry’s Body Composition section, has been awarded a 2026 Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award for his project “Development of a Clinically Accessible Optical Scanner for Body Composition Assessment in Early Life.” The Early Career Award Program supports promising junior investigators launching independent careers in pediatric research.
“We are impressed by the quality of your application, and we look forward to working with you as you launch your career in pediatric research.”
— Justin Brown, President, Thrasher Research Fund
The clinical gap
There is no validated, low-cost tool for infant body-composition assessment in clinical or field settings during the first five years of life. Reference methods such as DXA, BodPod, and Pea Pod are accurate but expensive, fixed-site, and impractical outside a research lab — leaving pediatricians and global-health programs to rely on weight-for-length and BMI percentiles that obscure the underlying fat-mass and fat-free-mass composition that actually drives long-term metabolic risk.
What the project will do
Bennett’s hypothesis is that a tablet-integrated three-dimensional optical scanner can accurately and reliably estimate fat mass and fat-free mass in young children, providing a practical and scalable tool for nutritional assessment in clinical and low-resource settings. The cross-sectional validation study will enroll 40 children ages 2–5 at Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu. Each participant will undergo three assessments — tablet-based optical scanning, manual anthropometry, and bioelectrical impedance analysis — with validation performed against reference measures using Bland–Altman analysis, intraclass correlation coefficients, and root-mean-square error.
If the tablet system holds up under that validation, it would extend the lab’s optical-scanning work — already deployed across adult body composition through Shape Up! Studies and being refined for infants and toddlers in Shape Up! Keiki — into a portable form factor that a pediatrician, public-health worker, or field researcher could carry to where the children are. As Thrasher puts it: “a validated, portable tablet-based scanner for infant body composition would transform early growth monitoring across clinical and low-resource settings globally.”
Award details
- Mechanism. Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award Program
- Award amount. $26,750
- Project start. March 1, 2026
- Mentor. John Shepherd, PhD (Director, Shepherd Research Lab)
- Supervising institution. University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center
View the full grant record on Thrasher’s site ↗
Congratulations, Jon — well-earned recognition for years of careful work building the multicompartment body-composition models that make this validation possible. Thanks also to the Thrasher Research Fund for backing junior investigators in pediatric research, and to the families enrolling in our keiki studies whose participation makes any of this work imaginable.
Update — May 2026: Effective May 1, 2026, Bennett transitioned from a postdoctoral researcher with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaiʻi (RCUH) to a Junior Researcher with the University of Hawaiʻi — a promotion that confers principal-investigator status and lets him apply independently for federal research funding. The Thrasher Early Career Award is his first independent grant in that role.