Drawn to the MPH Program’s focus on sustainability, equity and engagement, Dr. Kate Dickin joined Cornell’s MPH faculty in 2021 after over a decade as a researcher and mentor with the Division of Nutritional Sciences. There, she led multiple international and U.S. research projects, and taught a class for undergraduates in Cornell’s Global and Public Health Program to prepare them for experiential learning in a variety of settings. They discussed factors relevant to community engagement, such as social identities, cultural humility, and implicit bias, while critically reflecting on their motivations for pursuing careers in global and public health. This year, Dr. Dickin developed a new “Public Health Nutrition” course for MPH students. “I try to have students co-create the class,” she says, by suggesting topics that most interest them. She designed the course as “a tasting menu” of global and domestic topics.
Dr. Dickin first arrived at Cornell for an MS-PhD program in international nutrition, but left the program after completing her MS “to get more practice and program experience.” She spent the next 10 years working as a consultant based in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Washington, DC, focused on maternal and child nutrition. While she enjoyed her involvement in community-based formative research and program design, she found that funders usually wanted to invest in “something new” rather than the sustained implementation of programs. In response, she returned to Cornell for her PhD, conducting research on the motivations and support needed by frontline nutrition educators in community based programs for low-income families in New York.
Today, Dr. Dickin’s largest research project is with the social and behavior change team of USAID Advancing Nutrition, an international consortium of 10 organizations. One project focuses on measures of caregivers. “We want to understand what enables a woman or caregiver to actually benefit from an intervention program,” she says, including social support, self-efficacy, mental and physical health, and other factors necessary “to engage in and put what they learn from an intervention into practice.” Dr. Dickin’s group also looks at how to engage family members other than mothers, such as fathers and grandmothers, since nutrition programs in low-and middle-income countries “tend to overload the moms.” The project aims to develop program guidance and tools that help “create enabling environments” for improving nutrition practices through consideration of cultural norms, family, and community contexts.
In addition to international projects, Dr. Dickin works on food insecurity issues among under-resourced U.S. families. Currently, she is leading Cornell’s part in a multi-state USDA-funded effort to revisit the USDA’s 25-year old questionnaire for measuring household food security. While the tool had already been translated into Spanish, it had not been fully tested with Latinx participants, so Dr. Dickin worked with four bilingual MPH students to recruit, conduct, and analyze Zoom interviews with low-income Latinx caregivers who live with at least one child and experience stress feeding their families. Her team interviews participants about their perceptions of questionnaire items—related to not having enough food, needing to skip meals, or worrying about affording a balanced diet—to ensure the items are interpreted as intended. One challenge is reconciling the current Spanish translation with “the many versions of Spanish” people actually speak, says Dr. Dickin, who partners with Cornell Cooperative Extension in New York City and Long Island to reach people with Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Central and South American heritages.
Written by Audrey Baker