-meals continue Cristina Gago up at night, Not due to cravings or indigestion—Gago, who acquired her Ph.D. from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in May, remains up overdue considering nutrients and public fitness. “It’s now no longer something that I can simply place down while I’m achieved with paintings for the day,” she says. Gago, now a postdoc at New York University Langone’s Center for Healthful Behavior Change, says “nutrients are a part of each piece of our lives. There are huge, apparent disparities in getting entry to meals, the manner we’re capable of engaging with it, and what meaning for our gift selves and our destiny fitness.”

She first have become aware of those disparities as an undergraduate biology pupil at the University of Southern California, where she taught anatomy classes to neighborhood 5th graders as a volunteer. While discussing the digestive tract, she delivered in culmination and veggies to assist illustrate the way it labored. “A lot of children simply didn’t understand what a number of them were,” she says. “I thought,

-‘how is that even possible?’”

The enjoy set her on a professional course centered on enhancing get entry to fitness-selling sources amongst historically underserved populations. She evolved an ardor for comparing the effect of nutrient interventions as an MPH pupil at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. When she got here at Harvard Chan School for her Ph.D., she centered on venture assessment. While a pupil, she applied and evaluated more than one public fitness project—from culturally tailor-made wholesome ingesting applications for Latino adults to family-primarily based nutrients applications with the Massachusetts workplaces of WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) and Head Start.
Project assessment, she says, informs the whole lot about public fitness. “You want on the way to appearance up earlier research and research what’s labored and what hasn’t,” says Gago. “It’s additionally a genuinely respectful exercise: asking members to reflect, and speaking to the bigger international what that they’d to mention and why it’s critical. A lot of the time they’re genuinely excited that will help you make it higher.”
Public fitness Ph.D. applications at the Harvard Chan School are presented via the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in a partnership that incorporates complete economic aid. Gago says that having this guide changed into a welcome extrude from operating more than one job at the same time as getting her blended bachelor’s and master’s at USC. “It changed into faculty after which paintings after which homework overdue at night. This investment allowed me to make my faculty and studies my complete-time job, for the primary time in an extended time.”
Her foremost supply of economic guidance changed into the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health–Dana-Farber Cancer Prevention Fellowship, funded via a National Cancer Institute T32 program. In addition, she acquired guidance via the Irene M. and Fredrick J. Stare Nutrition Education Fund. This fund, which—not like a few different Ph.D. investment streams—isn’t tied to precise projects, gave her instructional freedom and flexibility. “The Stare investment allowed me to paintings with 5 special mentors, paintings on more than one project, and observe something possibilities met my mastering goals.”
She drew throughout her reports in operating on her doctoral dissertation, a multilayered evaluation of nutrient interventions for diverse, low-earnings households with younger children. She hopes her findings will assist destiny interventions to enhance baby and grownup fitness.
Ultimately, Gago hopes to come to be a professor of populace fitness. “I genuinely price the collaborative nature of universities and the independence to invite questions which might be urgent, novel, and critical for the international,” she says. Wherever she goes, Gago plans to hold the usage of her love for assessment technology to enhance how public fitness works.
“I genuinely price the collaborative nature of universities and the independence to invite questions which might be urgent, novel, and critical for the international.”

-Nurtured with the aid of using a sturdy legacy:

The push to enhance fitness via nutrient technology has lively generations of college students and college at Harvard Chan School because Fredrick J. Stare based the Department of Nutrition in 1942 with a team of workers of three. Stare changed into a number of the first to analyze the effect of weight loss programs on coronary heart disease, and his high-profile advocacy for higher nutrients has helped form the route of public fitness. The branch he based has grown to consist of extra than a hundred colleges and a team of workers contributors and has educated masses of masters and doctoral college students.
Stare’s effect additionally maintains via the Irene M. and Fredrick J. Stare Nutrition Education Fund, named in honor of Stare and his wife. The fund changed into hooked up in 1976, while contributors of the Department of Nutrition voted to apportion a part of a fashionable fund, and it’s been generously supported with the aid of using the Stare family. In the 2021–2022 instructional year, the Irene M. and Fredrick J. Stare Nutrition Education Fund supplied an economic guide to 6 Ph.D. college students, which includes Cristina Gago.

-Frank Hu:

who’s the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and Nutrition Department chair, says the Stare Fund is supposed to guide the improvement of high-effect leaders in nutrients studies and coverage. “Cristina’s studies is a splendid example, permitting the interpretation of current dietary technology into public fitness exercise and coverage to enhance the fitness of low-earnings households.”