NutraWomen Wednesday: Dawna Salter-Farfan, PhD, RD, Senior Manager of Clinical Research, PLT Health Solutions

07-Dec-2022 - Last updated on 07-Dec-2022 at 18:48 GMT

Dawna Salter-Farfan, PhD, RD, spent over a decade at Amway, providing expert scientific and technical guidance for product formulation, labeling and advertising claims. After 14 years at Amway, Salter-Farfan joined PLT Health Solutions to support the company's expanding clinical development program, including trial design, reporting and publication. She joined the company's Innovation team helping drive the discovery and development of new science-based ingredient solutions.

“I’m just been a real stickler for products that are backed by science and evidence and in that regard, I'm just really lockstep with PLT,” said Salter-Farfan. “We oversee a lot of clinical trials to back up our products and I get to design them, I get to monitor them as they go along and I get to look at all the data, analyze it and translate that into meaningful benefit claims for customers. And so, I'm really, really enjoying it. It really taps into a skill set I think that I've honed over my whole career, but it's also providing me a lot of opportunities for growth. So I'm excited for the future.”

As a key member of PLT’s Innovation team, Salter-Farfan oversees and develops products. She said beauty-from-within is one category that really got more marketers thinking about women beyond just prenatal supplements. But as Salter-Farfan pointed out, women want more than just beauty outcomes.

“There's really become an awareness that women are a very unique consumer and we have a lot of need states because we have a lot of concrete life stages that have different needs. So not only are we just one consumer target, we're actually like five because of all these different needs that we have as we go through our life,” said Salter-Farfan. “One of the things that I think that we really need to target is the evidence-base for women. There's a preponderance of clinical studies that are only using men, a preponderance of outcomes that are not relevant specifically to women and I think that's something that I'm really pushing on to make sure that we have women included in clinical studies and that we have our study outcomes that can be targeted for women's health in particular.”