The Recent White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health: How USDA is leveraging the Conference momentum and where you can help?
Abstract
Dr. Bleich is the first Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service. In her role, she is leading a whole-of-Department approach to tackling food and nutrition insecurity. Dr. Bleich also served as one of the key USDA leads on the recent, historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. At today’s seminar, she will share how USDA is leveraging this Conference to promote nutrition security and she will highlight how Tufts’ faculty, staff, and students can help accelerate progress on the Conference’s goals of ending hunger, improving nutrition and physical activity, and reducing food insecurity and diet-related diseases.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sara Bleich is the Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity in the Food and Nutrition Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), after serving as the Senior Advisor for COVID-19 in the Office of the Secretary at USDA (2021). She is a policy expert and researcher who specializes in diet-related diseases, food insecurity and racial inequality with more than 175 peer-reviewed publications. She is on leave from her post as a Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Bleich was also a White House Fellow during the Obama administration, where she worked at USDA as a Senior Policy Adviser for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services and with the First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative. She holds degrees from Columbia (BA, Psychology) and Harvard (PhD, Health Policy).