Dissertation Focused on East African Women’s Diets
Nicole Chimbetete is a third-year PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program (JDP), Health Behavior at San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Nicole is from Zimbabwe and came to the United States in 2013 to pursue a Dietetics degree at St. Catherine University before completing her Masters in Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Nicole became interested in researching how people’s access to food such as fruits and vegetables differs within their communities.
After completing her Master’s, Nicole worked for the Minnesota Department of Health. She analyzed food access and talked to different public health departments on increasing and using their funds to increase fruits and vegetables in their communities. During this work, Nicole decided she wanted to pursue a PhD and design studies to allow her to continue to work with food access. Nicole currently works in Dr. Anderson’s lab as a graduate student researcher.
Nicole’s dissertation will be part of Dr. Anderson’s research on underrepresented populations in San Diego and will implement a community-based behavioral intervention study to optimize healthful dietary intake and improve cardiovascular health. The study is a community-based behavioral intervention study to optimize healthful dietary intake and improve cardiovascular health. Nicole’s dissertation focuses on the formative portion of designing the research and its feasibility. This formative research will use behavioral theory to look at this population’s willingness to participate in behavioral intervention and participate in measurements, including blood pressure, sodium tracing, and questionnaires. This study is funded by the McCormick Science Institute, a spice company that strongly supports science and health regarding herbs and spices.
Nicole also has worked with the Joint Doctoral Program Student Association, Dr. Strong (UCSD) and Dr. Oren (SDSU), to apply for SDSU student success fee funding to create a workshop on anti-racism in public health. Nicole said, “racism is a huge problem in public health when you consider the historical systematic impact of health policies that do not serve underrepresented populations, and dealing with racism is not something we are robustly trained in.” Nicole led the application efforts on behalf of the student association to jointly take it upon themselves to educate the public health student body more on addressing and handling racism as future public health researchers and practitioners. The student group brought in two professors, Dr. Rev. Christopher Carter and Dr. Seth Schoen from USD, focusing on a compassion model regarding anti-racism. The training took place over two six-week cohorts focusing on public health students.
