Healthy Food Retail, Chair
What I do:
Melissa Fuster is an associate professor in the Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences at the Tulane University Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Her work examines the cultural and contextual factors influencing food practices, food environments, and the policies and interventions implemented to improve them. She is the author of the book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City, and currently leads research to change social norms influencing dietary choices, focused on restaurants and policy implementation research. Her work applies systems thinking, human-centered design, and implementation science, along with mixed methods approaches. She is also a Fellow at the CUNY-SPH Center for Systems and Community Design and a member of the editorial collective for Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. Fuster completed her Ph.D. in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and a post-doctoral fellowship in food studies at New York University. Before joining the faculty at Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at CUNY- Brooklyn College.