Awards and Honors
This year our faculty were the recipients of numerous honors and distinguished awards. Their respective contributions to their fields continue to move nutrition science forward and inspire critical changes to the policies that influence lives both locally and globally.
Sara C. Folta, PhD was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Friedman School's Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year Award. The award is given to a faculty member who has made outstanding contributions to the Friedman School in teaching, research, or public impact. Dr. Folta has made contributions in all of these areas to the School, the University, and to the community, including her roles as a faculty member, as co-Chair of the Friedman School Social Justice, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee, as the Friedman School's Doctoral and Postdoctoral Officer, and in her other roles at Tisch College, the Tufts CTSI, and on University committees.
Alice Lichtenstein, DSc, PhD, received a 2018 Alumni Award of Merit from T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Additionally, at this year's ASN meeting, she received the Conrad A. Elvehjem Award for Public Service in Nutrition.
Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, was honored by the Museum of Science with the Walker Prize. A nutritional epidemiologist and cardiologist named one of the world’s most influential scientific minds by Thomson Reuters in 2016, Mozaffarian received the award on September 24, 2018 at a celebration at which he gave the lecture, “The Future of Food and Nutrition: Implications for Science, Dietary Guidelines, and Food Policy.”
An entrepreneurial team from the School of Engineering and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy recently was a finalist in the recent Elevator Pitch Contest organized by Sight and Life Foundation. The team includes Shreyas Kamath, Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering; Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education at the School of Engineering; Christina Economos, PhD professor of nutrition; Erin Hennessy, PhD, assistant professor at the Friedman School; and Eleanor Shonkoff, PhD, a former postdoctoral scholar at Friedman. Their novel idea, called Picture This!, provides an accurate account of a person’s food and nutrient intake using digital imagery. The team won a trip to the American Society for Nutrition’s Annual meeting to pitch their proposal to potential investors.
Simin Meydani, DVM, PhD, Friedman School professor and director and senior scientist in the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the HNRCA, was named an ASN Class of 2019 Fellow for her distinguished career in nutrition science. This is the highest honor bestowed by the American Society for Nutrition.
José Ordovás, PhD, Friedman School professor and director of the Nutrition and Genomics Research Lab at HNRCA received the ASN Foundation Mentorship Award.
Susan Roberts, PhD, Friedman School professor and director of the Energy Metabolism Research Lab at HNRCA, received the General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition Innovation Award.
Jacob Selhub, PhD, professor emeritus at Friedman and former senior scientist and director of the HNRCA's Vitamin Metabolism Laboratory, was given the Robert Herman Memorial Award. This award is given to a clinical investigator whose research has contributed greatly to the advancement of clinical nutrition, particularly the biomedical and metabolic aspects of human nutrition.
Gail Rogers, M.A., Senior Statistician in the Nutritional Epidemiology Program at the HNRCA and Friedman School instructor, received the 2018 HNRCA Staff Recognition Award.
The Jean Mayer 25-Year Scientific Leadership and Service Award was bestowed upon Andrew Greenberg, M.D., Friedman School professor and senior scientist and director of HNRCA's Obesity Metabolism Laboratory.
Sai Krupa Das, Ph.D., Friedman School associate professor and HNRCA scientist, received The Robert M. Russell Scientific Achievement Award.
Friedman School Professor and HNRCA Senior Scientist Xiang-Dong Wang, M.D. was awarded a pilot grant to study SIRT1 activity, circadian clock and aging-related disease.
Irwin Rosenberg and Jeanne Goldberg received professor emeritus status during the 2019 Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy commencement ceremony.
The Bergstrom Foundation Professorship in Global Nutrition was established in May 2019, and awarded to Sean B. Cash. He gave a lecture at the award ceremony titled, "The Role of Consumer Research in Improving Global Nutrition."
Dan Maxwell, the Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and who directs the Food Security and Livelihoods in Complex Emergencies Research Program at the Feinstein International Center, and Kirsten Gelsdorf revised Understanding the Humanitarian World, first published in 2009 by Routledge.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently awarded Erin Hennessy, PhD, MPH, assistant professor at Tufts' Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, a grant of $8.5 million to test and evaluate the use of telehealth innovations in delivery of USDA’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) gave the 2018 Distinguished Quality of Communication Award to Parke Wilde for the second edition of his textbook, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Earthscan/Routledge, 2018). This book uses real-world controversies and debates to motivate the reader's attention to economic principles, policy analysis, nutrition science and contemporary data sources. The new edition includes a companion website with study questions, additional appendices, and role-playing exercises suitable for classroom use.
The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) gave the Quality of Research Discovery Award to Will Masters for recent research.
The Food Forum of the National Academies held a workshop in August 2018 on Sustainable Diets. The workshop report was published by the National Academies Press in November 2018. Parke Wilde was on the organizing committee, and both Wilde and Nicole Tichenor Blackstone were presenters. The workshop discussed "how sustainable diets influence dietary patterns, the food system, and population and public health."