Dr. Sara Bleich is the Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity in the Food and Nutrition Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), after serving as the Senior Advisor for COVID-19 in the Office of the Secretary at USDA (2021). She is a policy expert and researcher who specializes in diet-related diseases, food insecurity and racial inequality with more than 175 peer-reviewed publications. She is on leave from her post as a Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Bleich was also a White House Fellow during the Obama administration, where she worked at USDA as a Senior Policy Adviser for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services and with the First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative. She holds degrees from Columbia (BA, Psychology) and Harvard (PhD, Health Policy).
Advancing nutrition security through the USDA Federal Nutrition Safety Net and leveraging behavior change science to inform policy
This keynote address will describe how USDA is advancing nutrition security through the Federal Nutrition Safety Net with an emphasis on key streams of research which can help inform policy. Dr. Bleich will first provide an overview of the variety of actions the Biden-Harris Administration has taken to prioritize nutrition security during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is, spending on USDA’s food and nutrition assistance programs jumped 30 percent in fiscal year (FY) 2020 to a record $122.1 billion. This included USDA waivers allowing flexibility in the administration of USDA’s 15 existing food and nutrition assistance programs and the creation of programs, including Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT, money for missed meals due to school closures). In FY 2021, USDA expenditures on federal nutrition assistance programs was further expanded through the American Rescue Plan, which extended SNAP, increased access to fruits and vegetables for each WIC participant, extended and expanded P-EBT, added new funding for US territories, and provided funding for meals for young adults experiencing homelessness. USDA also revised the Thrifty Food Plan – the basis for determining SNAP benefit amount – to better reflect the cost of a healthy basic diet. Taken together, the USDA is taking critical steps to ensure access to safe, healthy and nutritious food in all communities to assist with pandemic recovery and beyond. Throughout the presentation, Dr. Bleich will integrate key ways behavioral change science has informed USDA’s actions to date and put forth recommendations for how behavioral change science can help the USDA further advance nutrition security through the Federal Nutrition Safety Net.
Sara will be presenting on May 18 on:
Advancing nutrition security through the USDA Federal Nutrition Safety Net and leveraging behavior change science to inform policy
David Conroy, PhD is a Professor at The Pennsylvania State University. His research aims to make behavior change less effortful and more enjoyable. This work seeks to realize the vision of precision behavioral interventions by leveraging information about people in context to promote health behaviors at critical moments of opportunity and vulnerability. His ongoing research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He currently serves as the President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.
Context-sensitive, just-in-time interventions to promote physical activity and fluid intake
Many ordinary behaviors in daily life can have an extraordinary impact on health. These ordinary behaviors, such as physical activity or fluid intake, become second nature and automatic for some. Others struggle with these behaviors, especially when their lives are busy and competing goals vie for their attention and effort. One solution for this sizable latter group involves using just-in-time adaptive interventions to tailor intervention delivery to moments of opportunity or vulnerability. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work that leverages technology to monitor contextual changes and inform micro-intervention decisions in two digital messaging interventions. The first example involves a physical activity intervention that applies tools from control systems engineering to develop person-specific models of physical activity dynamics and decision rules based on those models. Inputs in these models include a person’s recent physical activity, the day of the week, momentary location-specific weather conditions, and historical responses to different message content (e.g., move more, sit less). Those person-specific models are used to determine if a message at that moment would be expected to increase physical activity and which message would be best to send. The second example involves a fluid intake intervention for patients with kidney stones. It integrates a connected water bottle, mobile application, and a custom smartwatch app that detects drinking gestures into a semi-automated tracking system to detect drinking behavior. When patients with goals to drink regularly throughout the day lapse, the system delivers delightful reminders to drink via multimedia text messages. These digital tools illustrate the potential for drawing on contextual information to deliver interventions at moments of opportunity or vulnerability. They represent one step toward realizing a vision of precision behavioral interventions for physical activity and behavioral nutrition.
David will be presenting on May 19 on:
Context-sensitive, just-in-time interventions to promote physical activity and fluid intake
Dr. Olga Sarmiento is a Professor at the School of Medicine at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá Colombia. Her research focuses on applied multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research by evaluating community programs in Latin America. She has served as a board member in the International Society of Urban Health (ISUH), the Latin American Network of Urban Health (LAC-Urban Health), and the International Society of Physical Activity and Public Health (ISPAH). She is part of the project SALURBAL (Urban Health in Latin America), the IPEN network, and the Stanford-Colombia Collaboratory on Chronic Disease (S-C3). She has published 190 peer review papers.
Inequality in physical activity from the region of Latin America
Latin America is one of the most violent and urbanized regions in the world, with large populations living in informal settlements and substantial social and spatial inequalities. Together, these social disadvantages manifest themselves in physical activity inequalities within and across cities. Amid social and gender inequalities, Latin America is also recognized as a major hub for innovation in recreation, urban transport, and mobility policies. These interventions provide culturally competent interventions to promote physical activity among vulnerable populations and women. During this presentation, I will show the evaluation through natural experiments and observational studies that use a mixed-methods approach of programs including the Ciclovías Recretivas, physical activity programs in Parks, and mass transit systems for the public transportation. These programs, out of the health sector have the potential to promote physical activity and impact the well-being of women, children, and older adults and their urban settings in the region of Latin America and could serve as examples for other regions in the world.
Olga will be presenting on May 20 on:
Inequality in physical activity from the region of Latin America
Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, DrPH, MPH is an Indigenous (Choctaw) community-based participatory researcher. Her work focuses on intervention science that combines research with action for social change. Valarie received her doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular disease prevention at Stanford University, where she also completed a degree in documentary filmmaking. She has been the Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on 10 NIH-funded trials focused on food systems and health, including the THRIVE study, the first randomized trial of healthy makeovers in tribally-owned convenience stores, and the FRESH study, a farm-to-school intervention to reduce obesity in Native families. Valarie directs the Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences where she is a Professor of Medicine. In all her work, she has fostered long-term mutually beneficial relationships with Indigenous communities that support tribal sovereignty and build the capacity of Indigenous communities to improve health.
Community-based participatory interventions to supply Indigenous food sovereignty and health
Indigenous communities experience disproportionality high rates of food insecurity and chronic disease as a byproduct of settler-colonial activities, which included forced relocation to rural reservation lands and degradation of traditional subsistence patterns. Many Indigenous communities have worked to revitalize their local food systems by pursuing food sovereignty, regularly expressed as the right and responsibility of people to have access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods, while defining their own food systems. Food sovereignty is a promising approach for improving health. However, virtually no scientific interventions have incorporated this approach into community based research studies to improve diet and reduce chronic disease risk. This presentation will share the process and outcomes from two randomized control trial studies guided by a food sovereignty framework with Indigenous communities in Oklahoma.
Valarie will be presenting on May 21 on:
Community-based participatory interventions to supply Indigenous food sovereignty and health