Melissa Fuster, PhD

Dr. Fuster’s work examines the contextual factors influencing food practices and the policies and interventions implemented to improve them, with a focus on Latin American communities, as presented in her book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City. Expanding on this work, she is currently focused on food environment policy implementation research and evaluation. Ongoing projects include the evaluation of the New Orleans Healthy Kids Menu Ordinance, requiring restaurants to offer healthy default beverages with children's meals in collaboration with Xavier University of Louisiana, and the Voices at the Table project, where Fuster is working with multisectorial stakeholders to codevelop interventions to improve healthy and environmentally sustainable choices through Black and Latin restaurants. This work applies human-centered design, implementation science, and systems thinking. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and her Social Entrepreneurship Professorship at the Tulane University Taylor Center for Social Innovation. She is also a Fellow at the CUNY-SPH Center for Systems and Community Design and a member of the editorial collective for Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. She completed her Ph.D. in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and a post-doctoral fellowship in food studies at New York University. Before joining the faculty at Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York Brooklyn College.