Data Science Institute

Diana Grigsby-Toussaint joined the School of Public Health in Fall 2019 as an Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences.  As a social epidemiologist, her research seeks to capture complex processes in the food, social and built environments to facilitate a better understanding of their influence on what has been coined the three pillars of health: diet, physical activity and sleep. She is particularly interested in vulnerable (e.g., low income) and racial/ethnic populations across various stages of human development. Her work is grounded primarily in theoretical approaches from epidemiology (documenting determinants and distribution of risk in populations), nutrition (processes by which individuals obtain and utilize food) and geography (the role of place in shaping health risk). In addition to exploring non-communicable disease risk among vulnerable populations in the US, she is also exploring the impact of the nutrition transition on health status in Ecuador and Uganda.

How does your research, teaching, or other work relate to data or computational science?

My work currently involves working with multiple data sources to examine environmental influences on health, primarily green space. I integrate satellite imagery from NASA with other environmental sources of data from the EPA, for example, as well as the US census, and Google Street view, among others.