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Biography
Nicole Tichenor Blackstone is a tenured Associate Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Blackstone is a sustainability scientist who studies the environmental and social impacts of food system innovations, interventions, and policies. She collaborates with colleagues across disciplines and institutions, from medical doctors at University of California San Francisco to engineers at Texas A&M and labor rights experts at the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab in the UK. Her research has been published in high-impact journals, such as Nature Food and the Lancet Planetary Health and has been supported by over $13M of federal, philanthropic, and private sector funding to date.
Currently, Dr. Blackstone leads the Leading a Sustainability Transition in Nutrition Globally (LASTING) Project, which focuses on advancing a four pillar framework for food systems transformation (environmental, social, economic, and health). Specifically, the LASTING Project develops and applies new methods, metrics, and data to estimate the impacts of dietary shifts and inform evidence-based policies, programs, and market-based solutions. Some examples of LASTING’s work include 1) assessing the health, environmental, cost, and labor implications of shifting to recommended diets in the US, 2) conducting a global expert elicitation to identify priority metrics for sustainable diets across all four pillars, 3) analyzing the environmental and health impacts of scaling up Food is Medicine sourced from local, organic farms.
Dr. Blackstone is also a founding affiliated faculty member of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture and Co-Project Director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded National Institute for Cellular Agriculture. She leads or co-leads several cellular agriculture projects that focus on analyzing the environmental and social impacts of future cultivated meat systems, developing sustainable, animal-free scaffolds, and optimizing culture media.
