Colorado State University is the land-grant University in Colorado and is located in Fort Collins, 65 miles north of Denver. Fort Collins is a great university community of 120,000 people located on the great Colorado Front Range. Rocky Mountain National Park and many other summer and winter recreational areas are short drives from Fort Collins. There are approximately 25,000 on-campus students attending Colorado State.

The mission of the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition (FSHN) is to illuminate the role of food and nutrition in the health of society through education, research, outreach, and service. Approximately 400 undergraduate students choose from two strong undergraduate majors - 1.) Nutrition and Food Science with four different options including Dietetics, Nutrition and Fitness, Nutritional Science (pre-med curriculum), and Food Science and Safety; and 2.) Restaurant and Resort Management. Our undergraduate program in nutrition and dietetics and our Restaurant and Resort Management Program are nationally recognized with excellent placement rates for our graduates. The department also has well-established M.S. and Ph.D. graduate programs in Nutrition and Food Science, with approximately 70 graduate students currently enrolled. Recent Ph.D. graduates have garnered research positions at outstanding academic institutions including the Nutrition Department at Virginia Tech, and the Schools of Medicine at Harvard, Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Mississippi. Through the Cooperative Extension Faculty, our department provides educational outreach to the majority of counties in the state of Colorado, and our nutrition education programs serve as models for many other states and land-grant universities.

Faculty and staff make significant contributions to the field by presenting and publishing their scholarly research in both applied and basic nutrition science. In 2003, the faculty/staff published 41 refereed articles, with many of these papers appearing in flagship journals including the Journal of Nutrition, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, American Journal of Physiology, Prostaglandins Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Journal of Food Science, and Journal of Food Safety. Department faculty and staff are currently involved in multi-year grant and contract research and education programs totaling more than 6 million dollars. The University of Colorado-Colorado State University Nutrition Consortium provides opportunities for graduate students to work on research projects at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. The Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition offers the annual Lillian Fountain Smith Nutrition Education Conference each June. This is made possible by an endowment from the family of Lillian Fountain Smith and is one of the major outreach activities of the department.

The Department is housed on the all of the second floor and part of the third floor in the Gifford Building, which is located in the basic science area of the campus. Over 20,000 square feet of space are assigned to the department. This includes faculty and graduate assistant offices; several classrooms equipped with excellent multimedia equipment; graduate and undergraduate student computer laboratories, and nutritional biochemistry laboratories, five of which were renovated in 2003.