Our group tore it up at back-to-back scientific meetings this year!

Congratulations to post-doc Godfred Boateng, who received first place in the American Society for Nutrition’s Emerging Leaders Poster Competition! The Community and Public Health RIS awarded this to Godfred presented his work entitled “Food Insecurity and HIV-exposure are Deleterious to Infant Cognitive Development in Kenya: A longitudinal study”. He also received a travel award.

Congratulations to undergraduate Lauren Blacker who received second place in the American Society for Nutrition’s Emerging Leaders Poster Competition. This is particularly impressive as she was competing against post-docs, graduate students and undergrads. Lauren’s work entitled “Household food insecurity and gender inequity is associated with high prevalence of maternal depression amongst female farmers with young children in rural Tanzania” was well received in both poster and oral presentation sessions at Experimental Biology in Chicago. Well done, team!

Lauren Blacker (left) and Godfred Boateng (right), laden with certificates from the Emerging Leaders Poster Competition.

Congratulations to Dr. Bronwen Powell! Our paper, based on her excellent dissertation work, is entitled “The determinants of dietary diversity and nutrition: ethnonutrition knowledge of local people in the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania“. It was published in the Journal of Ethnobiography and Ethnomedicine.

Anna Earnest is pictured here in her garden where she has planted cassava along the field margin of the tea plantation. Anna lives on a tea estate where her husband works and described the utility of her garden, listed in the following passage: “If I plant cassava like this one, I do not need to buy it, even beans. You will find them [those who work for the tea company and don’t engage in agriculture] drinking tea alone, or tea and boiled banana. And as for cultivated vegetables, I will harvest leafy vegetables and they will eat only dagaa.”

Our invited review on water insecurity “Progress in Household Water Insecurity Metrics: A Cross-Discpilinary Approach in the Social Sciences” has been published in WIREs Water. This marks the beginning of an exciting cross-disciplinary collaboration as delve into the many aspects of household-level water insecurity globally! Special thanks to Wendy Jepson and Amber Wutich for being such awesome collaborators.