Education
ScD
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
2013
MHS
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
1997
Overview
I began my international career working in Nepal and Bangladesh as a nutritional anthropologist and NGO worker, doing research on dietary practices in pregnancy and lactation—this work then grew into an appreciation for the important role that nutrition can play in improving pregnancy outcomes and child health. I worked for many years as a nutritionist in the U.N. World Food Programme doing nutrition surveys in many humanitarian emergencies, developing M&E systems for child feeding programs, and working on issues related to nutrition and HIV. After about a decade of work I returned to do my PhD in Nutrition with a focus on Nutritional Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, where I focused on acquiring the skills needed to undertake rigorous studies to explore relationships between nutritional exposures and pregnancy, health and child development outcomes. At Harvard I did a year-long Fellowship at the Center on the Developing Child to learn about child development, and I continue to do research on the links between nutrition in pregnancy and early childhood and links to child development.
I am currently undertaking research as part of the USAID funded Feed the Future Nutrition Innovation Lab using data from a national nutrition surveillance system to improve our understanding of the links between agriculture and nutritional outcomes. I do research with the JiVitA project in Bangladesh on issues related to micronutrients, nutrition in pregnancy, developmental origins of health and disease. I am working with researchers from Tufts University, Tribhuvhan University in Nepal, and University of Bergen Norway on a project to adapt the Ages & Stages questionnaire, a child development assessment tool to a Nepali context and to understand links between animal source food production and consumption and child development in Nepal. I collaborate with WorldFish, an agricultural research organization, on research related to aquaculture, fisheries and nutrition . I also collaborate with researchers as part of the Global Burden of Disease project and have an Adjunct Lecturer position in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Courses:
In 2017 I will co-teach International Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Degrees
Sc.D. in Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston MA
M.H.S. in International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD
B.A. in Anthropology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA