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Biography
Dr. Khristopher Nicholas is an interdisciplinary food systems scientist with a focus on human-environment interactions. Beyond understanding how climate and other environmental stressors shape planetary health outcomes, he seeks to understand the bi-directional relationship of human behavior as both adaptive and reactive. He employs mixed methodologies to assess empirical measures of planetary health alongside subjective measures that emphasize community, traditional ecological knowledge, and lived experience. His interdisciplinary published research, spanning global and US settings, includes studies on water security, climate and stunting, perceptions of healthy eating, livelihood resilience, and geospatial measures of food access.
Dr. Nicholas’ research agenda is driven by the following two interrelated objectives:
- A methodological objective to link social and ecological systems by assessing the role of human behavior within environment-diet-health relationships.
- A focus on climate vulnerability and food sovereignty in settings that reflect the pitfalls of a global food system built on resource extraction and power imbalance.
Dr. Nicholas’ overarching research objective is to identify—and ultimately reinforce—new and existing strategies that foster resilience in climate-vulnerable settings. Reflecting his own upbringing in the Caribbean and Florida, much of his work builds on collaborations with communities practicing smallholder farming and small-scale fishing in climate vulnerable small island settings such as the Galápagos islands of Ecuador and in southwestern Madagascar. His work also explores food security in the United States, ranging from agricultural resilience to federal nutrition assistance program access.
Dr. Nicholas earned a PhD in Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill and a BA in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. Prior to Tufts, he completed a Yerby Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University. His non-academic loves include cycling, woodworking, science fiction novels, his cats, and no-recipe cooking.