Center Events

Food Choices among Dominican Women in New York City: Interaction of Food Culture and Environment
Carol Devine and Pamela Weisberg-Shapiro, Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University

Tuesday, April 30, 2013
12:00-1:00PM
Beebe Hall, 2nd floor conference room

This talk is open to all. Lunch will be served. Metered parking is available in the Plantations lot across the road from Beebe Hall.

This is a BCTR Innovative Pilot Study Grant recipient talk.

Dominicans are a large and growing population in New York City with significant health and economic challenges. This qualitative study investigated how Dominican women defined and interacted with their food environments and how socio-cultural factors shaped their choices with implications for nutrition interventions in urban communities.

Project collaborators:
Carol Devine, PhD, RD Professor, Division of Nutritional Sciences
Pamela Weisberg-Shapiro, MPH, RD, Doctoral Candidate, Division of Nutritional Sciences
Sandra P Gucciardi, MPH, RD, Extension Associate, Cornell University Cooperative Extension of New York City

Carol Devine is Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University, where she studies continuity and change in nutrition practices over the life course and how these practices are affected by life transitions, social roles such as work and family life, and the lived environment. She has over 35 years of community nutrition research and outreach experience, focusing on the use of environmental strategies to promote healthy eating and physical activity in worksites, childcare, and other community settings. Professor Devine is a Co-Investigator on SCALE (Small Changes Lasting Effects), an NHLBI-funded weight loss intervention with low income Black and Latino adults in New York City. She is a member of the Cornell NutritionWorks team, offering on-line professional development for over 10,000 nutrition and health professionals around the world and is a co-author of an online course on ecological approaches to obesity prevention. She earned her doctorate in nutrition from Cornell University, her master’s degree from Tufts University, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire.

Pamela Weisberg-Shapiro is a doctoral candidate in Community Nutrition in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. She received her bachelor’s degree in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University and Master’s in Public Health from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. After completing her MPH, she moved to New York City to work in field of health education where her experience as a researcher at the Mount Sinai Hospital and Program Manager at HIP Health Plan fueled her interest in health disparities in urban areas. In an effort to better understand how health disparities can be ameliorated, she has focused her dissertation research on Dominican women living in Washington Heights and the South Bronx, which you will be hearing about today.