Building Evidence for Equity

Dr. Frances Fleming-Milici is Director of Marketing Initiatives at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. Her work focuses on the targeted marketing of foods and beverages to children, adolescents, and parents of young children, and examines the racial and ethnic differences in rates of exposure and the impact of targeted marketing practices.

Research produced by the Rudd Center reveals that Black and Hispanic youth are exposed to more food marketing compared to their White peers, and that marketing for products in primarily unhealthy categories—including fast food, sugary drinks, candy, and sweet and salty snacks—is disproportionately targeted to Black and Hispanic communities. The Rudd Center team led by Dr. Fleming-Milici has conducted invaluable research in the field of targeted marketing and the health and nutrition disparities associated with it.

Dr. Eduardo J. Gómez is a Professor and Director of Lehigh University’s Institute of Health Policy and Politics. A political scientist by training, his research focuses on the politics of global health policy, with a focus on emerging middle-income countries. In 2023, Dr. Gómez received a grant from RWJF to conduct research into food as a human right, for which he will conduct fieldwork in Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa—three countries that have enshrined access to food as a human right in their constitutions.

Dr. Gómez’s previous research has also included a global viewpoint on the right to healthy food access; his book, Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries Are Reshaping Emerging Economies, explored the regulatory policies behind junk food marketing and sales in South America, Asia, and Africa.

Poonam Gupta is a research associate in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she focuses on research related to food security, food access, adequacy of the social safety net, and issues affecting undocumented immigrants.

She contributed to “Exploring the Role of Equity in SNAP Modernization and Access,” a brief produced with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that identified key barriers to achieving equity goals in access to SNAP benefits. The brief offers recommendations for supporting state SNAP administrators in better meeting the nutrition needs of those participating in SNAP. Gupta has also contributed to research on barriers to food security and access in Virginia.

Dr. Kumanyika’s expertise is in public health nutrition and strategies for achieving equity in the prevention and management of obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases. She is the Founder of the Council on Black Health, formerly the African American Collaborative Obesity Research Network (AACORN), whose mission is to realize healthy Black communities.

In 2017, Dr. Kumanyika developed the Council’s “Getting to Equity in Obesity Prevention Framework” to help researchers and practitioners develop equity-oriented obesity prevention strategies—from using policy interventions to improve healthy options for communities, to identifying and addressing social determinants of health. At its core, the framework emphasizes equity as the key to advancing health and nutrition through research, policy solutions, and systems change.

Dr. Angela Odoms-Young is the lead investigator for the Nutrition Liberation, Food Sovereignty, and Justice Lab at the Cornell College of Human Ecology and directs the Food and Nutrition Education in Communities Program (FNEC) and New York State Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP).

Dr. Odoms-Young’s research explores the social and structural determinants of dietary behaviors and related health outcomes in populations earning low incomes and Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Her work also centers on developing culturally responsive programs and policies that promote health equity, food justice, and community resilience. In her research, she has examined the impact of structural racism on food insecurity, and shared recommendations for integrating equity into our food systems.

Dr. Cynthia Ogden is an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overseeing the analysis group within the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Her research focuses on nutrition, growth, and obesity, and she worked on both the 2000 CDC pediatric growth charts and the 2022 Extended CDC BMI-for age growth charts.

More recently, her work has examined the strengths and limitations of body mass index (BMI) as a measure of health, particularly from a public health and health equity standpoint. Studies have shown racial and ethnic differences in distributions of body fat and BMI are not always consistent and may not accurately represent a person’s health. Dr. Ogden presented these findings in 2023 at a NASEM workshop, Exploring the Science on Measures of Body Composition, Body Fat Distribution, and Obesity.

Sofia Segura-Pérez, MS, RD, is a community-based researcher and the Chief Program Officer of the Hispanic Health Council, a non-profit organization based in Hartford, Connecticut, with the goal of promoting equity and addressing health disparities for Hispanics, Latinos, and other vulnerable communities through research, advocacy, and culturally resonant services.

The Hispanic Health Council (HHC) offers nutrition and health services, operates youth programs, and conducts research to identify health-related needs with the community and design programmatic, policy, and systems changes to address them. In addition to her work with HHC, Ms. Segura-Pérez has conducted research in partnership with academic partners into food insecurity, dietary habits, food safety knowledge, diet-related disease, nutrition support program participation, and breastfeeding within Hispanic and Latino populations, using community-based approaches to break down barriers to good health and nutrition.

Dr. Qi (Harry) Zhang is a Professor at the Joint School of Public Health at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. As a health and behavioral economist, he focuses on WIC-related technology and behavioral research, including cash value voucher redemption, breastfeeding, and evaluation in the WIC program.

Central to his work is his commitment to reducing health disparities in communities of color and those who earn low incomes, and his research on WIC especially has helped to improve access and experience for the WIC program participants. Dr. Zhang also serves as Co-Chair of HER NOPREN WIC Learning Collaborative, a national network of WIC researchers, funding agencies, advocates, and practitioners seeking to promote collaboration, identify knowledge gaps and opportunities in the program, and mentor the next generation of scholars.