Dr. Laura Smith first developed an interest in toxin exposure and the concept of “anti-nutrients” while working on a Cornell collaboration with the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative in 2009. Cassava, a starchy root vegetable that can be grown with relative efficiency, was encouraged by the international community as a source of calories in many impoverished, rural areas facing acute food insecurity—but toxic cyanide is also present in raw, unprocessed cassava root, and in its leaves. “A lot of our work at the time was dispelling bias and misinformation about cassava in East Africa,” says Dr. Smith, whose work often sits at “the intersection between anti-nutrients and nutrients, and how that informs decisions.”

The next year, Dr. Smith joined the PhD program in international nutrition in Cornell’s Division of Nutritional Sciences. She quickly realized there was “a big gap in science” connecting aflatoxins and health, and began research to identify biomarkers for exposure in mothers and babies. While her lab research continues today, she considers her main accomplishment to be her success in “bringing together scientists across the world to measure difficult biomarkers.” Since the various standards for measuring these toxins are not made public, and require highly technical procedures and equipment, the lack of communication between different research groups had prevented analysis of large numbers of samples—which Dr. Smith set out to change.

Dr. Smith was first in Zimbabwe as part of a trial funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to combat child stunting, which leads to severe cognitive deficits and sometimes death, and afflicts over one quarter of all children under five globally. One intervention she studied is a peanut butter based supplement called Nutributter, which significantly reduced stunting, but the children in this trial were still nutrient deficient. Her subsequent research focused on a “more sustainable approach to meeting nutrition gaps.” Egg, zinc, iron-fortified sugar bean powder, and micronutrient-rich moringa tree leaves became supplements for more calorie-dense stunting interventions.

Though she thought she’d only be in Zimbabwe for a year, over 10 years later Dr. Smith still spends significant time in Zimbabwe, both conducting research and working with a smallholder, commercial farm where people from the local community, including school children, visit and contribute to raising animals and crops. Her current projects are more focused on the community level, and “having government partners join a project from the beginning.” Dr. Smith’s team is now piloting a Gates-funded, qualitative process that brings together farmers, academics, and government officials to create models of linkages between food, nutrition, health, income, and many other factors. While this process can be applied to many different health campaigns, her group is looking at the minimum acceptable diet (MAD) because the Zimbabwean government identified it as a leading concern, and “only about 8% of kids there meet the MAD,” says Dr. Smith. They are finding there are many complex reasons why kids are not getting enough food, including family work migration patterns. As a next step, her group plans to link this work with quantitative data to help create decision-making tools for government stakeholders.

Dr. Smith joined Cornell’s MPH Program as faculty in 2021 because she was excited to work with students who are “like-minded” and interested in interdisciplinary approaches to food systems and health challenges. As travel restrictions due to the pandemic ease, she plans to bring students to Zimbabwe, as well as Zambia and South Africa, for summer practicum projects in the field.

Written by Audrey Baker